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This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2017 issue, Number 24. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010).". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia.CONTENTS:WITH THE 2017 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists.EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple.FEATURED ART - An "Eat" theme.FEATURED POET - Jacqueline Osherow;(Interviewed by Malachi Black).FICTION - Tim Frank, Leslie Jill Patterson.ESSAYS - Rachel Hadas, Sam Aaron Morgan.BOOK REVIEWS - Brooke Clark.POETRY - Hailey Leithauser, Gail White, Scott Ruescher, Stephen Kampa, Catherine Chandler, Kathryn Locey, Jean L. Kreiling, Chris Fahrenthold, D. R. Goodman, Alexander Pushkin, Jay Rogoff, Terese Coe, Heinrich Heine, Timothy Murphy, Ann M. Thompson, Rob Wright.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2017 issue, Number 23. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010)." [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia."Able Muse is refreshing to read for its selection of poetry that adheres to form . . . a quality magazine offering the reader informed and unexpected views on life." - NewPages.CONTENTS:EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple.FEATURED ART - Zebra and zebra-related theme.FEATURED POET - Emily Grosholz;(Interviewed by Mark Jarman).FICTION - Tom Larsen, Israel A. Bonilla, Bruce Johnson.MEMOIRS - David Larsen.ESSAYS - Laura DiCarlo Short.BOOK REVIEWS - Brooke Clark.POETRY - Frederick Wilbur, Roy Bentley, Aaron Poochigian, Catharine Savage Brosman, Terese Coe, William Conelly, Horace, Ryan Wilson, Francesco Petrarca, Lee Harlin Bahan, Tatiana Forero Puerta.

In The Bard and Scheherazade Keep Company, Jan D. Hodge shows impressive formal dexterity, and inventive use of the double dactyl. He turns the difficult form on its head as it transforms into a narrative vehicle, retelling the great classics-the plays of Shakespeare, the One Thousand and One Nights stories from the Islamic Golden Age (as recounted by the legendary Scheherazade to the sultan Shahrayar), and the series of medieval European folktales about the trickster, Reynard the Fox. Hodge’s versification of these classic masterpieces manages to liberate this restrictive form and yet sustain its strict rules. This delightfully witty, quirky, playful collection reads naturally, while remaining lexicographically bounteous.PRAISE FOR THE BARD AND SCHEHERAZADE KEEP COMPANY:Jan D. Hodge has given us an astonishing book-as remarkable a tour de force as ever I’ve seen.┬á I wouldn’t have thought that witty verse form, the double dactyl, could be used to tell a story, but modifying the pattern only slightly, Hodge retells some celebrated stories in enjoyable style-Shakespeare plays, six tales from the Arabian Nights, and the popular medieval legend of Reynard the Fox.┬á You don’t have to admire poetic ingenuity to read them with pleasure, but I’m all dumb doglike admiration at Hodge’s spectacular triumph.             —X.J. KennedyJan D. Hodge’s mastery of the double dactyl is nothing short of stunning.┬á Open this book at random, and you will find the form perfectly used, the language both natural and original, and the wit a delight.┬á From Romeo to Reynard, you’re going to love these poems.             —Gail WhiteJan D. Hodge has renovated the most challenging of light verse forms and transformed it into a vehicle for poems that revisit classic works of literature.┬á Hodge’s deft handling of meter and intermittent quirky notes create a sense of intimacy between the reader and the poet that is both enjoyable and rare in today’s poetry.             —A.M. JusterABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jan D. Hodge grew up in a letterpress printing shop in small town Michigan, and received his BA and MA degrees from the University of Michigan and his PhD from the University of New Mexico, where he wrote his dissertation on Charles Dickens. He taught at Rockford (Illinois) College and at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa.       His poems have appeared in many print and online journals and anthologies, and his book Taking Shape, a collection of carmina figurata, was published in 2015 by Able Muse Press.

In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser transforms keenly felt experience and bittersweet memories into poems of impressive craftsmanship. She deftly muses on the dichotomies of, among other things, childhood and growing up, the headiness of love gained and the pangs of love lost, the joys of the nuclear family and the trials when it gets broken up. Although a first book, The Borrowed World is the seasoned work of poet of abundant talent coming into her powers and deservedly, the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR THE BORROWED WORLD:In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser's formal mastery-her consummate knack for writing lines and sentences as crisp and elegant as the Edo prints to which she pays homage-entwines with the sheer immediacy and vulnerability of the poet's voice. Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major talent.-Peter Campion, 2015 Able Muse Book Award judge Emily Leithauser's first collection, The Borrowed World, is an elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss, familial relations-with all the devastating implosions within-and our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning debut.-Natasha Trethewey, 2012-2014 US Poet Laureate If her intensely accurate perceptions of the physical world and the beautiful forms in which she sets those perceptions were all that Emily Leithauser gave us in these poems, they would be more than enough to satisfy the hungriest poetry reader. But step by perspicuous step, in poem after poem, she enlarges and encompasses, she broadens and deepens and transmutes perception into feeling, feeling into thought, and thought into revelation.-Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Love poems, family poems, narrative poems: The Borrowed World is a moving and memorable debut which covers a lot of ground but is always rooted in actualities. The poems are very well-made, too, but their equally great distinction is to be well-felt-subtle in their account of the observing "I," and simultaneously generous and shrewd in their understanding of others. Page by page, they create a series of powerful cameos; taken as a whole, their larger purpose emerges: to register what can be known and (especially) not known about our lives as individuals, and to value what time allows us to enjoy on earth, while admitting the brevity of our stay here.-Andrew Motion, 1999-2009 UK Poet Laureate I have read The Borrowed World several times, and each time I find more in it to be delighted and touched by. Emily Leithauser's art waits for you, and I am sure that you will be as pleased and moved by it as I have been.-Michael Palma (from the foreword)ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Emily Leithauser was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Western Massachusetts. She earned her MFA in poetry at Boston University and her PhD in English at Emory University, where she is a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Blackbird, Literary Imagination, and Southwest Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of the 2015 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans prize for poetry. She lives in Atlanta with her fiancé, Simon, and their two dogs.  The Borrowed World is the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award.

Alfred Nicol¿s Animal Psalms begins with the baseball field¿s organized uncertainties, and continues on many a trajectory of animal ruminations¿with the human species well accounted for¿ending in the imbalance of the everyday "Nuts" around us. The subjects include the elephant, snake, sheep, skunk, bee, couple dynamics, the trials and triumphs of the ruler or the everyman. This is a collection rich in aphorisms on the bright and shady spectra of our interactions. Recognizable soliloquies with the meditative self or dialogues with the beloved are unraveled for keen insights on the human condition¿deconstructing them until the knotty connecting threads are exposed. Nicol gives us a mature collection of quiet reflection, with wit and wisdom deployed through finely crafted poems of masterly formal dexterity.PRAISE FOR ANIMAL PSALMS:Dear reader, I've fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too. Read, for instance, the very last poem, "Nuts," and read the great "How to Ignore an Invisible Man," and you're hooked forever. Read all the rest, these poems by Alfred Nicol which have our numbers, and have his own too, that tell about our lives, and his, and the lives of snakes, and bees, and elephants, with such humor, and pity, and praise, for all of us, human and animal, in our situations. It's impossible not to fall in love.  ¿David Ferry, author of Bewilderment, winner of the National Book AwardAs the title Animal Psalms suggests, there is reverence here¿a reverence that derives less from religion than from a religious attention to the things of the world, from baseball games to zoo elephants to the newly beloved. Nicol is a melodic writer, called first to the music of words, to "speech that lets the sound/ carry the greater part of what is said." He's also a poet whose images you won't soon forget. They summon the real world and simultaneously render it otherworldly. While the poems offer moments of ecstatic escape, they're more often held in check by an Augustan wit, ironic humor and a touch of Baudelaire. Poise and wit prevail in these psalms; they give us both despair inflected by light and illumination held fast by darkness.  ¿Erica Funkhouser, author of EarthlyIf we would only take the time to let one of Alfred Nicol¿s poems sink in through the brilliant latticed grid of its formal exterior, how the truth of what he has to say about the human condition would hit us the way a line drive whips toward you on a dreamy summer¿s afternoon, startling you back into the electric now. I love these poems because they evoke for me the zany, spiritual energy of the Beats welded as only a workman can work unwieldy things to the tempered grid of six centuries of formalism. Don¿t be surprised if¿after reading these poems¿you find them turning back to their true subject, dear reader, which turns out to be none other than you.  ¿Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the JourneyABOUT THE AUTHOR:Alfred Nicol's book of poetry, Elegy for Everyone, won the first Anita Dorn Memorial Prize. He received the Richard Wilbur Award for Winter Light. He has written lyrics in French and English for nine original compositions by classical/flamenco guitarist John Tavano. Their CD, The Subtle Thread, has received airplay on WMBR's program French Toast. Nicol's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Dark Horse, First Things, The New England Review, Commonweal, The Formalist, and other literary journals, as well as in Contemporary Poetry of New England and other anthologies. Animal Psalms was a finalist for the 2015 Able Muse Book Award.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2015 issue, Number 20. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010).". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia.CONTENTS:WITH THE 2015 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists.EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple.FEATURED ARTIST - L├⌐on Leijdekkers.FEATURED POET - Amit Majmudar;(Interviewed by Daniel Brown).FICTION - Paul Soto, Lynda Sexson, Andrea Witzke Slot.ESSAYS - N.S. Thompson, Moira Egan.BOOK REVIEWS - Stephen Kampa, Robert B. Shaw.POETRY - X.J. Kennedy, Wendy Videlock, Kim Bridgford, Peter Kline, Catharine Savage Brosman, Terese Coe, Steven Winn, Jay Udall, Beth Houston, Jennifer Reeser, Leslie Schultz, Ryan Wilson, Max Gutmann, Freeman Rogers, Dan Campion, Brooke Clark, David Stephenson, Autumn Newman, James Matthew Wilson, Athar C. Pavis, Jeanne Wagner, Elise Hempel. 

Virtue, Big as Sin is impressively wide-ranging in theme and style. It illuminates everyday vignettes with solicitous spotlights such as the bereaved son sorting the contents of his father's medicine cabinet, or the father whose son's driver's education recalls the time his own ?unharnessed? Mustang went ?bungeeing? around a bend; it celebrates the artist's creative highs, or reflects on the misfortunate who is forever nearing the threshold of achievement, aware that life may prove a ?most inept librettist? and should thus be paired with our ?strongest song.? Osen's dexterity with both formal and free verse is apparent. His wit and humor prevent the serious from becoming ponderous while his intelligent insight lends depth to the lighthearted. Reading and rereading this outstanding debut collection, it is easy to see why?from the first poem to the last?it is a worthy winner of the 2012 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR VIRTUE, BIG AS SIN:Frank Osen's Virtue, Big as Sin offers one witty, elegant poem after another. The rhymes are especially clever, the meter sure, the stanzas well-shaped, but this poet's sense of proportion is also reflected in wisdom (and what is wisdom but a sense of proportion?). An urbane maker of sparkling phrases like ?that genuine Ur of the ersatz,? Osen can also write plainly, movingly, about a young girl's funeral. And he reflects often on art itself, which he so rightly calls ?the conjured awe.? ?Mary Jo Salter (Judge, 2012 Able Muse Book Award) In his talent for tragedy and comedy, and for mixing them, Osen takes his place in a distinguished line of English-language poets that runs from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our day. ?Timothy Steele (from the afterword) Reading Virtue, Big as Sin has left me with the sense of satisfaction and enduring pleasure that really good poetry always produces, even when it also does the rest of what honest writing may do: confirm suspicions about ourselves we wish we could refute, bring to mind aspects of nature we'd rather forget, and deliver alarming news about the future, both public and private. Frank Osen does all of this and much more, all with grace and wit, in language that makes the messenger thoroughly ?one of us.? ?Rhina P. Espaillat Frank Osen's poems revel in beauty and pleasure, in technical dexterity and high-gloss finish. Readers who care about such things will be abundantly rewarded. But the reveling is haunted by loss, awful possibilities of failure, a nothingness glimpsed beneath the carnival. One of Osen's avowed tutelary spirits is Wallace Stevens, and his probing of his subjects can often seem like an extended, heart-wrenching commentary on Stevens's line, ?Death is the mother of Beauty.? The fragility of beauty, the omnipresence of death, and the intimate connections between them, are everywhere present in these marvelously heartening and effective poems. ?Dick DavisABOUT THE AUTHOR:Frank Osen was born in Yokosuka, Japan, in 1954, grew up in Southern California, and is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He worked for many years in law, as general counsel to health care companies and also in real estate investment. He lives in Pasadena, California, and walks to work at the Huntington Library. He and his wife, Susan, have been married for thirty years and have three grown children. Virtue, Big as Sin is his first full-length collectio

Carrie Shipers's Cause for Concern traverses a landscape of assorted disasters-such as overwork and layoffs, the ill-fated explorer, circus mishaps, nuclear disaster and radiation-but at its heart is the personal disaster of spousal illness. While a spouse might avow faith in the sentiment of love in sickness and in health, the practice of such faith might come undone when faced with the reality of the ravages of illness on the stricken body of the beloved, alongside the caregiving mate who "could love/ [her] husband but distrust his body,/ expect betrayal at every turn." Full of incisive meditations on frailties and fortitude often delivered with visceral honesty, Cause for Concern is spellbinding from start to finish and, deservedly, the winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award for Poetry.PRAISE FOR CAUSE FOR CONCERN:Carrie Shipers's magnificent endeavor aims to control the uncontrollable. In her splendid collection Cause for Concern she gives us her spirited poems-subversively satisfying in our era of cool wordplay. Both her comfort with ambiguity and her sassy candor aid the poet as she writes of a wife who is hoodwinked into a necessary patience-one she both chafes from and rebels against after her husband falls seriously ill. In rhythms that alternate between hope and defeat, the poems track the illness, but also punctuate the couple's changed world with quirky observations and a scrappy spirituality. (Not to mention a canine companion.) Her poet's craft, palpable in every arresting line, makes the subtlest turns of vulnerability with enviable poise. -Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper GardenOnly a poet of unquestionable bravery and technical acuity could rehearse the quotidian details of a middle class, middle aged existence with such exquisite, irresistible and terrifying honesty. -Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected PoemsIf illness is a country inhospitable to guests, then Carrie Shipers's second poetry collection, Cause for Concern, is our guidebook, preparing us for what we will find in the waiting room, by the bedside, in the bathroom, or on the skin when the gauze is lifted. These are naked, open poems. They say things that make us wince, as when we look at an incision still puckered and red. Shipers reminds us that our lives must first be prodded and cauterized, if the injured parts are ever to heal. -Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Arranged MarriageABOUT THE AUTHOR:Carrie Shipers's poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Connecticut Review, New England Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. She is the author of Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press, 2010) and the chapbooks Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream Press, 2008).Cause for Concern is the winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award.

Asperity Street, Gail White's most balanced poetry collection, explores the breadth of human existence with cutting wit, irreverence, keen intelligence, and an uncommon mix of empathy and asperity. Besides the cynical or the lighthearted, which are hallmarks of White's work, there is a newfound earnestness and gravity in these poems in their survey and interrogation of the human condition. White journeys the span from nursery to hospice?in between, she navigates the prom, family occasions, mating, gossip, and money matters with masterful formal dexterity. This is a collection that rewards the reader with a thoroughly entertaining and illuminating experience.PRAISE FOR ASPERITY STREET:In her remarkable collection, Asperity Street, Gail White takes on the whole sweep of existence. The street becomes the road of a lifetime, beginning with a Southern childhood and ending with a hospice finale. Laconic, ironic and comic, White¿s drily resourceful, wickedly companionable voice takes aim on patrimony, matrimony, religion, money and the myth that assumes we choose our lives. With her sublime linguistic choreography, these poems dance to complex metrical tunes. We feel and hear them pulse with equal parts sympathy and vitriol. In Gail White¿s capable hands, Asperity Street unfolds as a brilliant mural we can return to again and again, as the poet does¿still vulnerable, and wiser each time. ¿ Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Gail White has done it again: here is another collection by one of Americäs wittiest, most technically adept, funniest and most serious commentators on what it feels like to be human. ¿ Rhina P. Espaillat (from the foreword), author of Her Place in These DesignsI looked forward to reading Gail White¿s new book of poems, Asperity Street, because I know she is one of Americäs funniest poets, so when I got the manuscript I sat down to read it immediately. I knew how much I would enjoy it. I was not disappointed. The first three sections of this four-part collection have wit and bon mots in good measure, socko endings, words I¿d never seen in poems before, like ¿cloacä or a made-up word ending, ¿substituth,¿ to satisfy a droll rhyme. But nothing prepared me for part four. Nothing procedural changed. The insights were as sharp as ever, the language exact and clear, the cleverness and dexterity with form as deft, the music as mesmerizing . . . but this was a serious poet I¿d not encountered before: there was a deepening of vision, an enhancement of feeling, the rueful treatment of life and death took on a cutting edge that slices to the bone. Don¿t miss reading this book. ¿ Lewis Turco, author of The Book of FormsABOUT THE AUTHOR:Gail White has published three previous books of poetry (The Price of Everything, Easy Marks and The Accidental Cynic) and several chapbooks, the latest being Sonnets in a Hostile World. She has edited three anthologies, including coediting The Muse Strikes Back. Gail is widely published and her poetry has appeared in such journals as Measure, Raintown Review, First Things, and Mezzo Cammin, and in anthologies such as Villa

In William Baer's Times Square and Other Stories, there are everyday characters walking extraordinary paths for love; there are smart, skillful characters struggling to reconcile their viewpoints and convictions with the status quo in fields such as art, education, the cinema and religious doctrine. There is baseball and the story of the skills, training and ethics of pitching in the big leagues. And there is war and an enemy invasion juxtaposed with a do-or-die chess game. The stories take us coast to coast from New York to LA, away to South America, and overseas to Eastern and Western Europe. This is a fun-filled, fact-filled collection that smoothly melds scholarship with the everyday for unique, fresh, and highly intelligent stories, which are also highly entertaining. PRAISE FOR TIMES SQUARE AND OTHER STORIES:How wonderful to come across such a serious collection of short stories! Not "serious" as in boring and tendentious; but serious as in grown-up, broadminded, large-hearted, sharply observed, and dryly, obliquely funny. Bill Baer's fiction kicks ass. ¿ Pinckney Benedict, author of Town SmokeAs elegantly written as they are inventive, the short stories in Times Square and Other Stories engage the reader all the way from the title piece, an ambitious tale that draws upon art, love, and the complex beauty of the human narrative, through eight other works that touch upon the timeless questions of what it means to create and to act, to be and to pretend. Baer¿s collection achieves that Horatian goal so sorely lacking in much of contemporary fiction¿informing while delighting at the same time. The obligation to craft is taken very seriously in these pages, but the effort that undoubtedly went into their composition could easily be overlooked due to the skill with which they are rendered, and the degree to which they are enjoyed. ¿ A.G. Harmon, author of A House All StilledTimes Square and Other Stories, William Baer's twice-measured fictions, channel the reflecting reflections of James and Borges back into our self-conscious consciousness. Like the four-story signs plastering the "real" Times Square, these signs sing themselves, maps as detailed as the things they represent. These fictions resuscitate Poe's unities of effects, breathing life back into the simulacrum of life. I loved this book; it can't help but blurb itself! ¿ Michael Martone, author of Four for a QuarterABOUT THE AUTHOR:William Baer, a recent Guggenheim fellow, is the author of eighteen books including The Ballad Rode into Town; Luís de Camões: Selected Sonnets; and Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters. His short stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Chariton Review, The Dalhousie Review, and many other literary journals. He's also a former Fulbright in Portugal and the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Chelsea Woodard's Vellum, a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, propels the reader along new paths of discovery in the quotidian as in the mythical. Its scope is far-ranging: a flower press received as a gift in childhood, Tarot reading with a favorite aunt, unexpected reflections at a tattoo parlor, reminiscing about an old flame, the discovery of rare volumes at the local library, or auctioning off old toys on eBay. Woodward's insights and sensibilities in the visual and performing arts are deftly realized in fine or broad strokes-as in "Coppélia," "The Painter and the Color-blind," "Degas's Nudes," or as in "Still Life," which muses that "It's difficult/ to give back life/ to what's been cut off from the living." Stories and scenes represented in popular artwork are reimagined in ekphrastics such as "Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting." With excursions into the surreal, myth is made, lived or remade, as in "Philomela," "Pegasus" and "The Feral Child." This is an exquisite debut collection that rewards the mind and senses with its formal impetus and deft musicality, its precise and lively language, its emotional compass.PRAISE FOR VELLUM:In her stunning first collection, Vellum, Chelsea Woodard offers us poems whose lucidity of attention grounds an imaginative realism where narrative becomes speculation, witness becomes mystery, and the body a space where desire and dread complicate compassion's summons to the social order. The honed music here thus reveals a deeper vulnerability. Such is its gift, the way in which poems might be rooted to the difficulty and heartbreak of the physical and yet apart, "their keel and gristle finally set/ into some deathless, disembodied flight." An astonishing book. -Bruce BondIn addition to her emotional maturity, part of what makes these poems memorable is Woodard's obvious mastery of language, her flawless sentences, the surprising way those sentences function and "mean" within the lines, the lines within the forms. -Claudia Emerson (from the foreword)Not the least of the attractions of this gifted young poet's first book is the exquisite, searing precision of her language-the obsessively exact diction; the tropes that map with such stunning accuracy the emotional contours of her narratives; the gestural, almost tactile quality of her syntax-all of these talents focused sharply on what Howard Nemerov said was the singular, most difficult achievement of poetry: "getting something right in language." I predict for Chelsea Woodard a long and enviable career. -B.H. Fairchild ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Chelsea Woodard received her MFA from the Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of North Texas. She earned a BA in Visual Arts and English from Union College. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, Best New Poets, Blackbird, 32 Poems and other journals. She currently teaches in New Hampshire where she lives with her husband, Pete. Vellum was a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award.

Uncontested Grounds, William Conelly's first full-length collection of poetry, is eclectic in people and places, deftly moving from vineyard to beach, to a Hollywood filmmaking set, and even to the cockpit of a jet fighter. This is also a collection of contrasts-the din of war in "The Lead Man" versus the "hot reductive shore" of "R & R," the tragedy of suicide in "Ernest in Elysium" versus the stir of the unborn "In the Ninth Month." This collection of masterfully crafted poems of vivid insights, often delivered with minimalist verve and directness, is fittingly a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR UNCONTESTED GROUNDS:Uncontested Grounds is a splendid, memorable book. The stylistic precision and trim architecture of these poems may remind us of Edgar Bowers and other California formalists. William Conelly, however, has a voice all his own-shrewd, wry, engaging. Even in his more expansive pieces he writes with epigrammatic force. The perceptions fueling his art are equally alert to the world's kindness and cruelty, and his work is impressive not only for its elegance but for its quality of lived experience-in short, for a kind of wisdom rarely found these days in verse.    -Robert B. ShawThis generous collection of the poems of William Conelly is all the more welcome for being long overdue. Here is a poet who finds extraordinary dimensions in ordinary experience, as in "Treasure" and "The Ford Birthday Ode," two memorable moments of childhood; as in "Aubade," "The Sailor," "Memento," and "In the Ninth Month"-this last from the point of view of a woman about to give birth. Conelly commands both strict form and free verse, and his language is often fresh and unexpected. Uncontested Grounds will stand as a notable book in this or any year.    -X.J. KennedyMidwestern by birth, William Conelly has lived on both US coasts, as well as in England and the Middle East. He is smart and imaginative, and brings a thriving intelligence to life's experiences. I found the poems in Uncontested Grounds original, diverse, and lucid.  Many are poems of place. The first of these features a bankrupt farmer who ponders the "blue, remorseless beauty" that first lured him onto the stricken acreage he must sell. But the places vary, and some exude enchantment. I am taken by the touch of a drowsy wife's feet in "Aubade," and the couple along Florida's "Gulf Coast" pitying "those who'll wake alone."  Conelly writes so well, in a variety of forms, I initially absorbed his insights heedless of their traditional underpinnings. These poems easily bear rereading then; they compose a fine selection from one of our best writers.    -William J. Smith ABOUT THE AUTHOR:William Conelly followed his father into the military. He later reconsidered, resigned, and took a Master's Degree under the distinguished American poet Edgar Bowers. After stints in transport and financial services, sales and commercial writing, Conelly returned to the academy in 2000 where, by turns, he has served as an associate professor, a tutor and an instructor of creative writing. His poetry has been published in Iota, The Lyric, Measure, Pebble Lake Review, Pleiades, Poetry Durham, Poetry Porch and elsewhere. He is a dual citizen of the US and the UK and maintains a permanent residence in the West Midlands town of Warwick. He is married with three grown sons.Uncontested Grounds was a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award.

Martin McGovern's Bad Fame muses on the perplexities and certainties of the human condition, often in soaring eulogies and searing elegies: as in "The Circle of Late Afternoon" which asks, "Isn't there an art to giving myself away slowly like wheat opening to the sun?"; or, "Processionalia," where "a bee/ abandons the tea roses/ and circle that black blossom of/ the widow's veiled face as if her tears were/ pollen and the bee could feather/ its legs with grief." Be it lore set in Colorado, or farther out, the personal and regional tributes unravel the universally familiar and pertinent. McGovern's debut collection is the work of a seasoned master in command of craft and themes.PRAISE FOR BAD FAME:Martin McGovern's long-awaited, well-constructed first book gives itself away slowly, artfully. It is carefully considered, quietly passionate, and deeply humane. -Edward HirschThere is an unforsaken paradise in these pages, and a lot of ungodly anxiety. . . . Like Dubliners, Bad Fame darkens, deepens, darkens through its sections, understanding with Joyce the tidal pull of place that will never let us survive if we resist the current . . . the "blue snow," not of Dublin, but of memory, of Colorado . . . this extraordinarily unique McGovern flair for the Keatonish (Buster) aside mixed with lyrical intellection, these poetic rooms with their many blue lights, direct or indirect, for us to turn on as night comes on. -David Lazar (from the foreword)Here are exacting sentences, any number irregularly hugged into the ferocious clusters which are Mr. McGovern's poems. My likely favorite, "If the Light Could Kill Us," does heavy duty as a garden unfurled at dawn, the beloved "still sleeping,/ flame-pink welts our love leaves on your almost/ too delicate skin, brazen in this light." And then the assault of a very different sentence, "Samuel Johnson is dead. And Mrs. Thrale./ And the kind cherub of a straitjacket/ she kept closeted should reason fail/ him thoroughly, where's that deck-coat now?" followed by other people's torments inspected so closely that this morning "violence/ lingers like the last touch of a season." Hence: "Only as I rise to pull the window's shade/ do you wake, dusted and dazed, as from a fever." Strong as they are, the sentences, like the centuries, are treated pitilessly, as you can hear, yet there is what the poet calls "the shimmer of a teen movie" throughout. Resilient art, and no loitering. -Richard HowardABOUT THE AUTHOR:Martin McGovern earned his MA in philosophy at Stanford University and his PhD in creative writing/literature at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Chicago Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He cofounded The Urban Theater Company in Houston and was Associate Artistic Director of Ad Hoc Theater and Artistic Director of Tir Na nOg: An Irish Theater in Denver. His play "Joseph K" earned the 2009 Denver Post Ovation Award for Best New Work. Having taught for Regis University's College for Professional Studies since 2007 and creating its MA in Creative Writing, McGovern is also now cofounder and codirector of that university's Mile-High Low-Residency MFA program.

Slingshots and Love Plums, Wendy Videlock's third full-length collection, sometimes evokes the lightheartedness of The Dark Gnu and Other Poems previous to it, sometimes enchants with the frolics and insights of her Nevertheless debut. It especially shines with the brilliance of its wit, its spirituality?as in Videlock's fiat lux invocation for her "Dear Reader" "resembling the first, or the last word." Harnessing proverbs, myths, paeans, execrations, riddles, and pithy odes to the natural world and the people around her, Videlock delivers an inspired collection that rollicks, startles and uplifts.PRAISE FOR SLINGSHOTS AND LOVE PLUMS:From its title to its last poem, Wendy Videlock's Slingshots and Love Plums offers a delicious variety of treats, from witty send-ups of contemporary mores to somber reflections on mortality, love, and friendship. The pleasures include off-kilter rhymes, elegant turns, earthy revelations, and the skillful mockery of pretentiousness in its various forms. -David Caplan, author of In the World He Created According to His WillVidelock arrests because she arrests the complacent drift of sense. She is so good at it that what begins as a taste for her work can quickly turn into a craving-for deliciously cryptic spiritual riddles. -David J. Rothman, author of Part of the Darkness, from the forewordWendy Videlock's poems in Slingshots and Love Plums sometimes hint at their Colorado origins but are never pinned down by a locality or a life story. They are gleefully universal, taking delight equally in huge abstraction and intimate real-worldliness. Whether enchanting, imploring, or arguing, they always fascinate, concentrating their acrobatics of thought and sound on the knots of the human experience. -Maryann Corbett, author of Mid EvilWendy Videlock is one of the few poets I can still read at length and purely for pleasure. Playfully wise, sharp-tongued, and surprising as ever, Slingshots and Love Plums is yet another treasure to be read and reread at your leisure. Thereafter you'll find all your thinking is rhymed-but, don't mind: it's just dust from the master. -Timothy Green, editor of RattleABOUT THE AUTHOR:Wendy Videlock lives on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. Her first full-length collection, Nevertheless, came out in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Colorado Book Award, followed by The Dark Gnu in 2013, a book she illustrated. Her chapbook, What's That Supposed to Mean, appeared in 2009. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals, most notably in Poetry and The New York Times.

Greed: A Confession showcases D.R. Goodman's honed sensitivity to the human experience and the natural world around us. Her sensible scientific background melds with a meditative outlook: "this// is a vertebra/ from a cow.// It will win no prize./ It is just the childish wonder/ from which the rest derives." This collection is a wellspring of keen observations, insight and secrets of nature, freely spilling out for those greedy for knowledge and enlightenment-as in the immediacy of "a certain joy/ that depends on nothing" and "wraps a tightness around your heart." Here is a masterfully crafted finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award-one brimming with delight, wit and insight.PRAISE FOR GREED: A CONFESSIONI feel incredibly fortunate to have learned of D. R. Goodman's poetry. Her technical control and powers of observation are extraordinary; diction, meter, and rhyming, superb. Writing about an egret, she details its "mind,/ a laser-focused eye, the weight of will"-attributes that apply equally to the poet. In "Autumn in a Place Without Winter," she says, "The season brings/ no clarity, but this: we're here, alive. . . ." This poet is alive to everything. You want this book. It's terrific.-Kelly CherryGoodman is greedy for things of this world-not in the rapacious, bottom-line manner of plutocrats, misers, and Wall Street brokers but for the enlightenment of the senses and the enrichment of her poetry. She's sharing the wealth she accumulates.-John Drury (from the foreword)At the core of Greed: A Confession are natural ironies, or disjunctures, or improbabilities replete with intrigue. The poems are frames through which we view the events. D.R. Goodman is a scientist of natural history, which, for her, includes human experience. The poet shows us how to see. The deep pleasure she takes in the process displays itself, with characteristic irony, in "A Certain Joy."-Clive MatsonD.R. Goodman's carefully crafted poems register a deep appreciation of the intricate meanings emanating from Nature's tangible riches. "Depth cannot hide" from Goodman's keen eye. "And so it flutters, sings,/ Betrays itself upon the face of things." From the sudden appearance of a hundred tiny, freshly metamorphosed frogs, to ginkgo leaves' brilliant, moonlit gold that "spurs imagination to those old/ heroic, dangerous quests of greed and sin," the wondrous wealth of existence evokes joy that compels the poet to confess her "greed" in the presence of such good fortune. Even the blithe partake of a "certain joy"-certain: particular and definite-that is not attained or stumbled upon; it simply is-the gift of being: "There is a certain joy/ that depends on nothing./ One inhabits it./ It is there in the day/ when you walk out, whether chill and gray/ or magnified by light, and you inhale it." Complex yet accessible, these formal and free-verse poems gift us with abundant insights to enjoy.-Beth HoustonABOUT THE AUTHOR:A native of East Tennessee, D.R. Goodman now lives in Oakland, California, where she is founder and chief instructor at a martial arts school. Her poetry has appeared in several journals, such as Crazyhorse, Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, Cold Mountain Review, Whitefish Review; and the anthology, Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets. She is the author of The Kids' Karate Workbook: A Take-Home Training Guide for Young Martial Artists (North Atlantic/Blue Snake Books); and an illustrated chapbook, Birds by the Bay. Greed: A Confession was a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award.

Jeredith Merrin's third collection, Cup, deftly muses on art, travel to exotic locations, nature's gains and losses, the resiliency of spirit juxtaposed against the body's frailty, the joys and discords of the familial unit, and aging without bitterness and giving "Praise/ to her or him who keeps, past sixty/ and in all weathers, an open heart." This collection of abundant wit, insight, longing and passion is deservedly a special honoree of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR CUP:In Cup we meet a poet of rare power and unique originality, unafraid of feeling, able to take on matters of the deepest consequence. Jeredith Merrin strikes me as admirably hard-minded, shunning poeticisms and needless wordage, delivering again and again the real thing. For proof, see the title poem, or the wonderful tribute to John Clare. Plunge in anywhere, and be regaled.¿X.J. Kennedy, Judge for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award". . . stanzas, rooms, lives./ And you, toiling to make it better,/ whatever your it is./ Each has a cup." In these forthright and moving poems written in restrained, disciplined stanzas, the stories are told of how we each, "trying to make it better,/ whatever . . . it is," have to find our own cup, and find it acceptable. This is most vividly so in the poems about the bravery and laughter required by a terrible sickness, but also in the very description of a block of still-inhabited Victorian houses, porch after porch, which is like a train going who knows where. The poems' stanzas are the rooms, and in the rooms are the lives.¿David Ferry, winner of the National Book AwardIn Cup, Jeredith Merrin confronts time's confounding passage, but there's not a glimmer of self-pity here, no mourning the fate of an aging body. Instead she offers us an artful contemplation of what age brings: the strangeness of shifting perspectives, the quiet richness of sustained love, and the unabated force of old griefs. Both witty and meditative, these poems brim with insight and affection. And "Lear's Macaw" alone is worth the price of admission!¿Mark Doty, author of Paragon ParkJeredith Merrin's exhilarating poems pulse with memory, with art, and the complex emotional richness that is the present. At the book's heart is a sequence of poems of helpless shock and of the courage of her adult daughter's confrontation with cancer: "She's doing it, my grown/ child, with characteristic kindness and/ intelligence. . . ." We recognize not only a mother's love, but also fury in the midst of crisis, and, most movingly, her admiration. The wished-for reprieve, "our raft saved for now," is, when it comes, "Easeful." These are understated yet passionate poems that ravish with their gallant dignity. Merrin's Cup is large and it is full.¿Gail Mazur, author of Figures in a Landscape ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jeredith Merrin¿brought up in the Pacific Northwest¿took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She's authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), she lives near Phoenix.

In Melissa Balmain's Walking in on People, the serious is lightened with a generous serving of wit and humor, and the lighthearted is enriched with abundant wisdom. She shows us how poetry can be fun yet grounded in everyday challenges and triumphs, with subjects ranging from the current and hip (Facebook posts, online dating, layoffs, retail therapy, cell-phone apps, trans fat), to the traditional and time-tested (marriage, child-rearing, love, death). Through it all, her craft is masterful, with a formal dexterity deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as the villanelle, ballad, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet. It is little wonder then that Walking in on People is the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, as selected by the final judge, X.J. Kennedy. This is a collection that will not only entertain thoroughly, but also enlighten and reward the reader.PRAISE FOR WALKING IN ON PEOPLE:Walking in on People grabbed me with its very title, and it never let go. Poetry these days is rarely so entertaining, so beautifully crafted, so sharp of eye, yet so wise and warm of heart. Melissa Balmain keenly perceives faults in people and in our popular culture, with piercing wit but never bitterness. Don't miss the wonderful "Lament," on what it takes to write a best seller, or "The Marital Bed," a love poem with naturalistic detail. She really commands her art. Indeed, I think any poet who rhymes lobsters and Jersey mobsters deserves to have an equestrian statue of herself erected in Bangor or Newark or both.- X.J. Kennedy (Judge, 2013 Able Muse Book Award)Melissa Balmain's poems add to the rhythmic bounce of light verse a darker, more cutting humor. The result is an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic.- Billy CollinsSo many of the poems in Melissa Balmain's triumphant debut lodge themselves in that Frostian zone where they are hard to get rid of. They recur in the mind in moments of hilarity and pathos, of exaltation and mortification, and they never let us go.- David Yezzi (from the foreword) Accessible and entertaining poetry doesn't often prevail over the grim personal memoir in poetry contests, but this time the judges were smart. They went for Melissa Balmain's stylish and always metrically perfect wit. You can relate to this poetry if you have ever: longed to save the restaurant lobsters from their fate, lost your lover to his electronic devices, faced the fact that babies are ugly and toddlers suppress your genius, or (of course) walked in on people in all the wrong places. With diverse forms, inventive rhymes, the right word always chosen and a sense of humor always in evidence-you really have no excuse not to buy this book.- Gail WhiteABOUT THE AUTHOR:Melissa Balmain is a humorist, journalist, and teacher, and the editor of Light. Her poems have been published in the anthologies The Iron Book of New Humorous Verse and Killer Verse, and in American Arts Quarterly, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The Spectator (UK), The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's, Details, and many other magazines and newspapers. She is a columnist for Success magazine and the author of a memoir, Just Us: Adventures of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber). Balmain has won national journalism honors and been a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award. She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband and two children. Walking in on People, the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her first full-length poetry collection.

Stephen Scaer¿s Pumpkin Chucking is a harvest of wit and enlightenment, gleaned from everyday situations. Scaer shows impressive formal dexterity, and inventive use of nonce and received forms—sonnet, double-dactyl, Old-English-style alliterative meter; he turns the limerick on its head as it transforms into a humor-laden meditative tool in sequences such as ¿Mid-Life Limericks¿ and ¿Classical Limericks.¿ Scaer¿s delivery is immediate, simple but never simplistic, laying bare the human condition to reveal that ¿The triumphs that [we] seek/ are held for their own sake,/ and shower us with grace/ like petals on the grass.¿ This finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award is a rare achievement in its deft marriage of the lighthearted and sublime. It is a book to relish from start to finish.PRAISE FOR PUMPKIN CHUCKING:Right from the opening sonnet in Pumpkin Chucking, the poignant "Hannah at Ten," you'll recognize Scaer as an outstanding lyric poet. But the prevailing voice in  this collection belongs to a hugely entertaining, middle-aged, middle-class Everyman writing about the everyday. Take the lifeguard, sung in Old-English-style alliterative meter¿"whistle-whirler," "Thane of the Poconos." Or the Hercules who can divert rivers into Augean stables with no hassles from the EPA. (And both of these pale compared to Scaer's "Classical Limericks.") Some of the poems are exquisitely lyrical: "Light Box," "Raspberry Patch," "Long Trail." Still, what you take away from the book is Scaer's deadpan humor¿a wit that's wicked but not mean. Often as not, the speaker is himself the target. And the more the guy makes fun of himself, the more we love him. He speaks for us all.¿Deborah WarrenStephen Scaer¿s Pumpkin Chucking celebrates the New England landscape while still being universal . . . and it surprises us with wit in the winking way of Frost.¿A.M. Juster (from the foreword)A collection with a range of forms as broad as Stephen Scaer's Pumpkin Chucking can read like an exercise book¿or like a tour of the expressive possibilities of all of English poetry. This book is decisively the latter. From the delightful "Mid-Life Limericks" to the modern idiom shaped to Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in "Wendell," each poem feels utterly natural, utterly native to the form. And don't miss "Sarcasm," a sonnet that deftly recasts Petrarch's jewels of transcendent love as stones that wound both lover and beloved.¿Richard WakefieldThis is a wonderful and entertaining book of poetry. Stephen Scaer's poems are full of wit, sarcasm and humor. His subjects are familiar to many of us: parenting, tedious jobs, home repair, dealing with middle age. But his well-crafted verse¿the rhymes alone are worth the price of admission¿is much more than that. Reading the poems, I was reminded of the voice of Screwtape dispensing advice to his devil-in-training nephew in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters: the humor is aimed directly at that familiar reflection in the mirror. When I was done reading and admiring these poems, I was left feeling like the narrator standing by his grill smoking a rack of ribs in Scaer's "The Sacrifice of Cain": &am

In Ellen Kaufman's House Music, which was a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, the everyday is remade into a luminous tapestry of intricate wordplay, delightful sound effects, and transcendent moments. Her observational skill about the commonplace is revelatory, with fresh insights on such wide-ranging subjects as construction work, native and exotic flora and fauna, a sewing machine and a piano handed down through generations, and a momentous visit to the doctor's office. House Music is a wonderful debut collection from a uniquely inspired poet.PRAISE FOR HOUSE MUSIC:Ellen Kaufman is a master of sight; her explorations encourage us to see the ordinary beauty in homely scenes. Equally important for any poet worth her salt, she is also a master of sounds. She fills her poems with mouth-watering phrases like "dollops/ and fillips of tulips," and delicious appreciations of domestic details. Her sly and understated villanelle, "A Flemish Still Life," epitomizes Kaufman's ars poetica as well as her observational skill. "No effort's wasted if you aim to please," it begins. It ends with the gentle command "Aim to please." Kaufman and her poems aim to please, and succeed in doing so. -Willard Spiegelman I've been reading Ellen Kaufman's poetry for many years now. There's no other experience quite like it. Her language is taut and her aim unerring: her poems fly straight and true. Part of this has to do with technical mastery. She is a virtuoso of meter and rhyme, and her deep understanding of how structure works in a sonnet or a villanelle, for example, results in poems that combine pattern or repetition with an astonishingly singular vision. -Jennifer Barber (from the foreword)The intelligence behind Ellen Kaufman's wonderfully realized House Music is poised and observant, its reflections unfolding in sinuous sentences that are effortlessly elegant and deceptively plainspoken. The subjects and themes of her poems are various-the family romance, an encounter with a panhandler, the first moon landing-often taking the form of enigmatic vignettes and fables like "Sonatina" and "Thirteenth Night," pervaded by a sense of the fragile contingency of life. House Music is a brilliant and powerful debut. -John KoetheEllen Kaufman's distinguished poems achieve their purposes by modulating a powerful self-containment, a powerful and wise human awareness, by means of a chorus of exquisite and luxurious local effects. They are astonishing acts of balance, intelligence, precision, eloquence, vision, imagination, and grace. -Vijay SeshadriABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ellen Kaufman earned an A.B. in English and Asian Studies from Cornell University, and M.S.L.S. and M.F.A. degrees from Columbia. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Pool, Salamander, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Tar River Poetry, Think Journal, and Verse. She has reviewed poetry for Library Journal since 1991. She was a 2009 MacDowell Colony Fellow and won the Southwest Review's 2012 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. House Music was a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award. The mother of two grown sons, Kaufman lives with her husband in New York City, where she has worked as a law librarian and

Carol Light's Heaven from Steam, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, moves effortlessly from the humorous to the serious, from mundane concerns to sublime. She writes as convincingly of carnal pleasures as of spiritual mysteries. Light's playful energy is imbued with pleasing rhythms and sonic patterns. With surprising wordplay and associations, she renders complex vistas as understandable simplicities, finds fresh, inventive turns of phrase that will remain with the reader. Her multifarious themes include questions of faith, divorce, childbearing, cathedrals, the Pacific Northwest, the Prairies, Italy-especially Rome-and beyond. This visionary debut collection will delight the discerning lover of poetry.PRAISE FOR HEAVEN FROM STEAM:Carol Light's Heaven from Steam is an extraordinary book, formally adept and wonderfully inventive. Light is a poet of arresting images and stunning sound effects; she needs just a few short lines to make even the old symbol of a sunrise worth our attention ("Pink lamé sundogs/ bodyguard/ the bigwig's dazzled rise"). However perfect her details, though, and however sublime her phrases, it's Light's restless intelligence that keeps me returning to her work. Here's a poet who inhabits, rather than frames the world; a poet of gestures, whose mind and heart are in motion, whether it's a shrugged shoulder, or rolled eyes, or an open-armed embrace. Heaven from Steam is a thrilling debut.-Jason WhitmarshThe book is marked by a lightness of touch. The overall effect is playful. . . . But she strikes another tone entirely in the crowning sonnet sequence, "Vicolo del Divino Amore" . . . the nimbleness with which she weaves and unweaves her lines and imagery around the birth of a yearned-for child.-Brad Leithauser (from the foreword) In one of his "Dream Song" poems, John Berryman writes, "The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once." Carol Light, in Heaven from Steam, performs arias again and again; her songs are equal parts rapturous ("the sun ignites the lantern world") and disquieting ("billboards blaze/ the end of days"). She takes up the Etruscan dead and the soon-to-be-living ("my one wish kicked/ and stitched herself into the world"), and she does so in lines that are musical and moving and often quite funny. She makes a magnificent debut. Upon finishing the book, readers will demand (like Goethe on his deathbed), "More Light!"- Cody WalkerAlthough these poems span landscapes from the Pacific Northwest to Italy, their true settings are interior, the complex terrain of an acutely observant and questioning mind. At times playful, at times philosophical, at times filled with longing, they take us past gulls and bell buoys, cathedrals and cobblestone piazzas, to the mysteries that surround us-and they do it all with stunning formal dexterity. Heaven from Steam marks the debut of a vivid poet already at ease with her art.-Linda BierdsABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carol Light received the Robert H. Winner award from the Poetry Society of America in 2013 and an award from Artist Trust in 2012. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Narrative Magazine, American Life in Poetry, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She studied poetry in the University of Washington MFA program, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She lives with her family in Port Townsend, Washington.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer, 2013 issue. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse¿online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010).". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry."  ¿ Dana Gioia.CONTENTS:EDITORIAL ¿ Alexander Pepple.FEATURED ARTIST ¿ Clara Lieu;(Interviewed by Sharon Passmore).FEATURED POET ¿ Greg Williamson;(Interviewed by Stephen Kampa).FICTION ¿ Jim Meirose, Ilya Lyashevsky, Haley Hach, Jonathan Danielson.ESSAYS ¿ David Mason, N.S. Thompson, Peter Byrne.BOOK REVIEWS ¿ David Caplan.POETRY ¿ Dick Allen, Fred Longworth, Catharine Savage Brosman, N.S. Thompson, Timothy Murphy, D.R. Goodman, Len Krisak, Propertius, Callie Siskel, Jen DeGregorio, Robert J. Levy, Ryan Wilson, Robert Schultz, Colin Dodds, Gerald Bosacker.

Strange Borderlands, Ben Berman's first full-length collection, counterpoises insights with uncertainties while chronicling the poet's immersion in a new culture. In compelling metrical, free verse and prose poems, Berman provides a vivid narrative of exotic adventures, especially his Peace Corps service in Zimbabwe-the people, the land, and his "struggling with the blurred lines of where things end" on his return home. This distinctive collection can go from humorous to heartbreaking, and is spellbinding from start to finish-a rare achievement.PRAISE FOR STRANGE BORDERLANDS:Ben Berman's wonderful first book, Strange Borderlands, is a masterful study in the power and limits of empathy, of respect for difference in tension with the urgent need for common ground. Beyond his formal and stylistic range, linguistic flexibility, eye for detail, irrepressible wit and powerful feeling, what's most impressive about this terrific book is Berman's inclusive generous spirit, the deadly serious imaginative play he exercises in every line of every poem. This is a book to cherish. ?Alan ShapiroThese are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism, a word so overused it is often flattened out to a platitude or piety. But not in this book. ?Fred Marchant (from the ?Foreword?)Ben Berman's lyric poems set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life: the hammer striking the sheep's head, the sustenance that follows; disciplinary beatings that students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade. Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty. I believe every word in this collection. This is an unforgettable debut by a powerful and humble voice. ?Dzvinia OrlowskyBen Berman's marvelous first book, Strange Borderlands, chronicles in startling and unforgettable poems his sojourn in Zimbabwe and his immersion in a culture that both embraces and exiles him, attracts and reproaches, changing him forever. Using a variety of poetic approaches?rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free verse?he gives us a multi-tonal description of landscapes that are as elusive as they are inviting, as unfamiliar to most of us as they are intuitively recognizable. This is a compelling poetry of ?strange borderlands where distance and intimacy collide.? ?Gregory DjanikianABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ben Berman grew up in Maine, served in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe and currently lives in the Boston area with his wife and daught

In Corporeality, Hollis Seamon¿s latest fiction collection, we meet the cat lady, the professor dealing with a plagiarist while coping with personal hardships, sibling rivalry of the unnaturally cursed kind, the dog that goes beyond everyday dog sense and scent to protect its owners. These are some of the eclectic characters and settings that make Corporeality irresistible and difficult to put down once you've started reading. Like her preceding collection Body Work and mystery novel Flesh, this book is a testament to Seamon's ample gifts as a storyteller.PRAISE FOR CORPOREALITY:Hollis Seamon's Corporeality is a wonderful collection of stories, dazzling and unsentimental, full of everyday tragedies, fairy-tale motifs, and rambunctious, life-affirming characters who stand up to bullies and to fate, whether in a hospice, a flophouse, or a university classroom. It's a feast of language that you won't soon forget. ?Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative and Alone with the OwlThe characters in Corporeality are smart. Smart enough to see that the world is chaos and decay, but sometimes too smart for their jobs, whether they're professors or trash collectors. And they are way too smart for their undependable bodies, which is the great rub of Hollis Seamon's fine and original stories. How do we cope, these carefully calibrated stories ask, when our minds grow daily more perceptive and sharp and witty, yet the darkness still approaches??Dave King, author of The Ha-HaWhat a magical collection! Hollis Seamon's enchanting stories will make you marvel anew at the forever strange, blessed, and heart-breaking affliction we share as human beings on this earth. Seamon's lovingly-rendered characters will linger in your memory for a long, long time.?Edward Schwarzschild, author of Responsible MenThese stories make memorable the people you wonder about in passing?the cat lady, the deformed, the witness to a questionable death, the professor who walks out of class never to return, the teen boy in hospice, the neighbors of the crazy, victims of acts of god, the loveless and forlorn. Written with both humor and pathos, the quirky characters in Hollis Seamon's stories drew me in and left me, as she writes, ?astonished by life.??Eugenia Kim, author of The Calligrapher's DaughterHollis Seamon casts full and dazzling light on those who are often overlooked?teenaged lovebirds in hospice, flood victims before the flood, plagiarists, arsonists, old ladies, fat dogs. She brings them to life so tenderly and powerfully that they stay with you, long after the last page.?Nalini Jones, author of What You Call WinterABOUT THE AUTHOR:Hollis Seamon is the author of a mystery novel, Flesh; a young adult novel, Somebody Up There HATES You (forthcoming, Algonquin Books); and a previous short story collection, Body Work. She has published short stories in many journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Greensboro Review, Fiction International, Chicago Review, Nebraska Review, Persimmon Tree, and Calyx. Her work has been anthologized in The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness, A Line of Cutting Women, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, and Sacred Ground. She is a recipient of a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Seamon is Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany NY and also teaches for the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Fairfield University, Fairfield CT. She lives in Kinderhook NY.