** Now Available for Pre-Order from ABLE MUSE PRESS:
~ WINNER 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 Collins
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 mobstersdeserves to have an equestrian statue of herself erected in Bangor or Newark or both.
— X.J. Kennedy (Judge, 2013 Able Muse Book Award)
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A Workshop at this summer's West Chester Poetry Conference, June 4-7, 2014, with Alex Pepple:
Are you (or someone in your circle) working on / polishing / or thinking of getting your manuscript/book out there? Then come one, come all and join me for a day of tips and tricks and how-tos and dos and don'ts.... Registration is still open. More here.
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** NEW** (Just Announced):
Hollis Seamon's Corporeality wins 2014 Independent Publisher's Outstanding Book of the Year (short story fiction category).
Corporeality - stories by Hollis Seamon
. . . Seamon off ers enough thematic and
narrative variation to keep each story in
this collection fresh.
— Publishers Weekly
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
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** NEW** (Recently Announced):
Ben Berman's Strange Borderlands (Able Muse Press, 2013) is a 2014 Finalist in the Massachusetts Book Awards.
Ben Berman’s debut poetry collection is a
compelling examination of the author’s experiences
in Zimbabwe as a Peace Corps volunteer.
. . . This is a must-have book for readers of
poetry.”
— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Ben Berman’s lyric poems set in Zimbabwe dig
deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life .
. . I believe every word in this collection. This is an
unforgettable debut by a powerful and humble voice.”
— Dzvinia Orlowsky
. . . read more | Order your copy now!
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House Music - Poems by Ellen Kaufman (with a Foreword by Jennifer Barber)
House Music by Ellen Kaufman is a finalist in the 2012 Able Muse Book Award.
[Ellen Kaufman’s] language is taut and her aim
unerring: her poems fl y straight and true.
– Jennifer Barber (from the Foreword)
The intelligence behind Ellen Kaufman’s wonderfully
realized House Music is poised and observant,
its refl ections unfolding in sinuous sentences that are
effortlessly elegant and deceptively plainspoken.
– John Koethe
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Heaven from Steam - Poems by Carol Light (with a Foreword by Brad Leithauser)
Heaven from Steam by Carol Light is a finalist in the 2012 Able Muse Book Award.
The book is marked by a lightness of touch.
The overall effect is playful.
– Brad Leithauser (from the Foreword)
Carol Light, in Heaven from Steam, performs arias
again and again; her songs are equal parts rapturous
. . . and disquieting
– Cody Walker
. . . read more | Order your copy now!
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Pumpkin Chucking - Poems by Stephen Scaer (with a Foreword by A.M. Juster)
Pumpkin Chucking by Stephen Scaer is a finalist in the 2012 Able Muse Book Award.
Stephen 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)
. . . the prevailing voice in this collection belongs
to a hugely entertaining, middle-aged, middle-class
Everyman writing about the everyday.
– Deborah Warren
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Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes - Poems by Barbara Ellen Sorensen (with a Foreword by Veronica Patterson)
These poems are attentive,
scrupulous, and transforming,
as they range from the sensuous to the spiritual.
– Veronica Patterson (from the Foreword)
Barbara Ellen Sorensen is . . . a modern Ovid
offering metamorphoses of the triumphs and ashes
of human existence in a voice at once
deeply personal and entirely of us all.”
– Suzanne Paola
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Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter - Poems by Maryann Corbett (with a Foreword by Peter Campion)
Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter by Maryann Corbett is a finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award.
"What makes Maryann Corbett such a rare, excellent writer must be her talent for weaving together various artistic impulses, so that her poems often sound both traditional and brand new, both humorous and serious, both worldly-wise and, as John Keats once put it, “capable of being in uncertainties.” [She] remains a poet of the first order, and her poems are cause for gratitude, and deep enjoyment."
– Peter Campion (from the Foreword)
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Virtue, Big as Sin - Poems by Frank Osen (with an afterword by Timothy Steele)
* WINNER * 2012 Able Muse Book Award
* Included in the First Books Panel at West Chester University Poetry Conference this summer
"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)
. . . read more | Order your copy now!
* Recent Release * from ABLE MUSE PRESS:
Sailing to Babylon - Poems by James Pollock (with a Foreword by Jeffery Donaldson)
* Included in the First Books Panel at West Chester University Poetry Conference this summer
* Currently, a Shortlisted Book for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize
* Finalist 2012 Governor General Literary Awards for Poetry
* Honorable Mention for the 2012 Posner Poetry Book Award
"The sentence, in James Pollock's remarkably assured debut volume, is a unit of music and of time, a carefully modulated choreography that moves the reader through an elegantly constructed set of meditations on place and history and the education of the self . . . . Quietly confident, formally adept, assured in their music, these artful lyrics are not only an accomplishment in themselves but promise to register, as the poet says, 'the breaking changes of a life to come'."
– Mark Doty, Judge's Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist
. . . read more | Order your copy now! |