Walking in on People (Able Muse Book Award) PDF Download

Author: Melissa Balmain
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409306
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 102

View

Book Description
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 Collins So 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 White

Author: Melissa Balmain
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781954158061
Category : Fairy tales
Languages : en
Pages : 44

View

Book Description
Pinocchio Runs for Office, The Peeved Piper, Not So Snow White and so many more in this twisted collection of adult fairy tales! This hilarious collection of poems by Melissa Balmain puts a grown-up, contemporary spin on the stories and characters we all learned as children, from Little Red Riding Hood, to the Three Bears, the Pied Piper, and Cinderella; each delightfully depicted in full-color by Ron Barrett, (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) one of the best and award winning illustrators in the business. Early Praise for The Witch Demands a Retraction: "If you're looking for the perfect bedtime poetry to send your little ones peacefully to dreamland, keep moving. In The Witch Demands a Retraction, Melissa Balmain's poetic retakes of classic fairytales, 'happy endings' means something else, and Mama Bear finds a clue in her bed that Goldilocks was not after the porridge. Witty, cringey, and hilarious. For every parent who wants a break from sincerity, and for every bad aunt or uncle looking for the perfect gift - this is your book." - Tom Bodett, author and NPR personality "This is an extremely irresponsible book - imprudent, unconscionable, certain to emotionally scar impressionable children for life. I highly recommend it." - Gene Weingarten, syndicated humor columnist, The Washington Post "Like Leopold and Loeb, Balmain and Barrett are a pair that will go down in history-not that I'm implying anything. It's just that when the right pair gets together at the right time, great things happen. And if a cousin or two had to die for this book? Totally worth it." - Michael Gerber, Publisher, The American Bystander "Does anyone say, 'OH NO SHE DI-INT!' anymore? Because that will be your response to basically every poem in this treat of a book. Balmain turns every fairy tale on its head and shows us its panties, none the worse for wear. Just don't be drinking anything while you read, because these verses are a recipe for spit takes. Balmain has a warped mind and astonishing wit matched thoroughly by her warm heart. Come for the fart joke, stay for the sly and bawdy feminism."- Faith Salie, comedian, author, journalist, seen & heard on CBS, NPR & PBS

Author: Ellen Cooney
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566896037
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

View

Book Description
A young interfaith chaplain is joined on her hospital rounds one night by an unusual companion: a rough-and-tumble dog who may or may not be a ghost. As she tends to the souls of her patients—young and old, living last moments or navigating fundamentally altered lives—their stories provide unexpected healing for her own heartbreak. Balancing wonder and mystery with pragmatism and humor, Ellen Cooney (A Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances) returns to Coffee House Press with a generous, intelligent novel that grants the most challenging moments of the human experience a shimmer of light and magical possibility.

Author: Rob Wright
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490710
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 86

View

Book Description
Rob Wright's Last Wishes is eclectic and delves into mining grit and lifestyle as fluently as it does into spiritual hopes and despairs, or the mind's lucidity and aberrations. Well-traveled in time and place, Last Wishes' culturally diverse characters and scenes--framed in Philadelphia, Fort Meyers, Manhattan, São Paulo, Kowloon, Majdanek, or elsewhere--are memorable or miserable. Accounts of ghosts and hauntings, imagined or real, include heart-stopping witness narratives of the Holocaust and other atrocities. This is a seasoned inaugural collection--a special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR LAST WISHES Rob Wright's poems in Last Wishes ache with a quiet, exquisite music. Whether at the edge of the forest, or before a mirror regarding his own face, or at the limit of what a son can feel for his father, Wright calls us to join him on his search for order and meaning, even as he questions what he finds: "The shell that holds all grief and memory, / in chains of molecules that make a mind, / will turn back into atoms, hungry, free. / We're spirits caught inside our skin and hair-- / ephemeral our dramas, spun from air." Such is the breathtaking beauty of Last Wishes, to long for what seems so close and yet, in the end, we cannot know. --Rafael Campo, author of Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems One of Wright's gifts is the age-old poetic magic of conveying beauty in what might at first appear to offer up nothing but ugliness. . . . It is fitting that one of the titles here is "Prologue for an Imaginary Play," because Wright's poems often are, in essence, little plays. The landscapes here are never static; like a photographer, or a cinematographer, Wright captures his subjects at their most revealing in a flash. Scenes are arranged and rendered at the moment of greatest drama and tension. --Alison Hicks (from the foreword), author of You Who Took the Boat Out  The first poem in Last Wishes describes in evocatively exact and gritty detail a landscape of abandoned mines, and ends with the poet’s mind reaching out toward the miners who once worked there: “I thought/ how hunger drives a man to crawl beneath/ the brittle crust that shuts out sun and sky.” Moments like this are repeated again and again throughout this obsessively compelling book—a surface (often enough a fairly bleak one) is described in richly precise detail, and out of it pasts, ghosts, the dead, revenants and spectral appearances emerge with a kind of beckoning, unreachable clarity that is at times wistful and at times brutal. If these poems were photographs most of them would be in grimmest black and white, but they would make a most marvelously enthralling exhibition. —Dick Davis, author of Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

Author: Ellen Kaufman
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490672
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

View

Book Description
Ellen Kaufman's Double-Parked, with Tosca navigates the natural and the manmade-often with an eye on their strained juxtaposition-or unravels the complex dynamics of the physical, social, and political. Kaufman can go from elegizing an Elizabethan old dress past to the environmentally conscious "now [when] the polar caps / undress themselves." She weaves the history of early settlements and their challenges and triumphs over the sometime inhospitable land; or negotiates the melding and mismatch of cultures in her native New York City. Kaufman's poems assert their claim inside violence, indifference, and exclusion. This surefooted second collection is a fitting special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR DOUBLE-PARKED, WITH TOSCA Ellen Kaufman's poems pierce the reader the way a needle pierces fabric. With a stunningly precise apprehension of the real, she stitches immigration histories and the intimacies of family life, cityscapes and suburban developments, the recent past and the perilous future. She has the power to shapeshift, too, so that we experience, as if from inside, the hidden life of a retired battleship, an algae bloom, a bird nesting in a traffic light. Marked by grief, endurance, and the truths of beauty made manifest, these are essential poems. - Jennifer Barber, author of Works on Paper Ellen Kaufman's absolutely terrific second book can fearlessly slash through pretext, but also cohere unlikely pairs through the X-ray delicacy of an ace metaphorist. She can use "he wanted to get laid" as a refrain in a satisfyingly avenging villanelle, and also see how a beret looks like a "fluffy flounder," and a chandelier handed down through generations "rattles like a skeleton." A tick can alternate stanzas with its host, and an orchestra can create a landscape from its instruments. Kaufman uses form-including a masterful crown of sonnets about her father's end of life-and the speaker herself takes form in persona poems of NYC landmarks; of the USS Intrepid, she writes, "the old moon / shuttle Discovery perches / like an aphid on a rose leaf." I bet you never heard that before! And so you will feel about this whole body of poems. Kaufman's wit, her craft, her vision-this book celebrates their collaboration. - Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone As a young person, the best poem I ever read in my life was a Petrarchan sonnet by Ellen Kaufman-before I even knew what a Petrarchan sonnet was. Now, in reading Ellen Kaufman's newest book, Double-Parked, with Tosca, I immediately see everything I want poetry to be: imaginative, evocative, observant, musical, filled with sound and living breath, and brilliant. I can't recommend this book and this author enough. - Nicholas Samaras, author of American Psalm, World Psalm ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ellen Kaufman's first collection, House Music, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award (Able Muse, 2013). A poem from that book won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize awarded by Southwest Review, where it also appeared. Her poems have also been published by Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Shenandoah, the Yale Review, and other literary magazines. Twice a MacDowell Fellow (2009 and 2013), she holds an AB from Cornell, and MFA and MSLS degrees from Columbia University. Formerly a poetry reviewer for Library Journal, she now reviews for Publishers Weekly. She lives near Straus Park in upper Manhattan.

Author: Maryann Corbett
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490540
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

View

Book Description
In Code was born out of Maryann Corbett’s years of work for the Minnesota Legislature, with a nonpartisan office that mandated that she maintain a public silence about politics. In poems that go from elegiac to fiery to funny, she examines behind-the-scenes legislative labor and the people who do it, the tensions of working for government in a climate hostile to government, and the buildings and grounds that put a beautiful face on a history full of ambiguities. This well-honed collection, Corbett's fifth, reflects on doublespeak and public poses; on coworkers and commutes; on legalese, courts, and elections; on news and history; and at last on retirement—through poems masterfully deployed in a dazzling array of forms: including the prose poem, the sonnet, the ghazal, the villanelle, and the canzone. Maryann Corbett is a candid, wistful, purposeful, and meditative poet in command of her craft. Of her years working for the Minnesota Legislature, Maryann Corbett writes in Rattle: "There was the frisson supplied by the constant presence of the media, the satisfaction of believing one's work served the public, the thrill of working with smart, motivated people, the pleasure of being surrounded by the striking buildings and gardens of the Capitol grounds, the sense of history. There was also the uncomfortable awareness that with every legislative session there are winners and losers, and that the same battles for justice are fought, and often lost, by the same people, year after year." In Code features poems that reflect on both those pleasures and that discomfort, as in these lines from "Seven Little Poems about Making Laws": Capitol café: German proverbs, whitewashed since 1917, are restored to view with bright applause. Old hatreds have new objects now. PRAISE FOR MARYANN CORBETT: Ned Balbo: . . . an extraordinary poet. Tony Barnstone: . . . metrical poetry infused with gorgeous imagery and the vernacular of our scientized world. Richard Wilbur: . . . accurate and delightful. Rhina P. Espaillat: . . . every section touches me and keeps calling me back. A.M. Juster: . . . wit without meanness, warmth without sentimentality, and craft without pretension. Geoffrey Brock: . . . one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry. Marilyn Taylor: . . . poignant, perceptive, exquisitely formed poems . . . a poet to be genuinely grateful for. Peter Campion: . . . a poet of the first order. Willis Barnstone: . . . a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Susan McLean: . . . a stunner. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English in 1981, with a specialization in medieval literature and linguistics. She expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She is the author of five books of poetry and is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her work is widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

Author: Susan de Sola
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490389
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 126

View

Book Description

Susan de Sola’s Frozen Charlotte spans the breadth of human experience-from celebration to lamentation, from gravity to lightheartedness, from domestic and quotidian scenarios to historic upheavals and their aftermaths, both European and American. She skillfully deploys an impressive range of formal styles and free verse in her debut collection. De Sola's Frozen Charlotte manifests all the hallmarks of a seasoned poet in surefootedness, wit, and depth of empathy.

PRAISE FOR FROZEN CHARLOTTE

The breadth of Susan de Sola’s poetry, by turns gossamer light and solemnly elegiac, offers a pleasurable aesthetic surprise from poem to poem-from “sun-starved Dutchmen” to immigrant Jews in Manhattan, from tulips to the life of a friend whose actual name she never knew, from the imagined language of rocks to a war widow’s cedar closet, from the death of an infant to conjugal love. Susan de Sola evinces wit and knowingness, a dexterity with verse, a way with form. The pleasure of de Sola’s poetry is to be in the presence of virtuosity and insight, of a poet who knows what it means to be human, and when to be serious and when to be light.
  -Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry

When I read Susan de Sola’s uncanny title poem “Frozen Charlotte” for the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I feel the same about the book as a whole, a virtuoso grouping of form and topic, a book that is haunting, yet which also sparkles with a sense of humor that I much enjoyed. Susan de Sola, it seems, can write in any form. While this book is her first full-length collection, it is the work of a master craftsperson.
  -Kim Bridgford, author of Undone

Whether their subject is a painting by Sargent, a gathering at the site of a Holocaust deportation center, or the bestial appearance of ATM machines, Susan de Sola’s poems seem animate with her vision: the poems breathe on the page. Part of de Sola’s power lies in her formal acumen. Every word here seems carefully sieved from the welter of English, and each poem’s form is perfectly matched to its ambition and music. De Sola’s tonal range is equally rich-she is by turns funny and dark, pensive and sly, her voice resounding in the reader’s head long after a poem’s final line. Like its memorable title poem, Frozen Charlotte intrigues, goes deep, surprises. It is a book rich with the pleasures the best poetry provides.
  -Clare Rossini, author of Lingo

This book has many moods and many messages for any reader who pays the poems collected here the attention they deserve. At times it seems a fairground, at times a graveyard, and neither cancels the other out. It is a mark of Susan de Sola’s always persuasive rhetoric that we see that both characterizations are somehow, simultaneously, true, and that despite their exhilarating variety these poems are of a piece and come from one complex, sophisticated, supremely alert sensibility.
  -Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of Love in Another Language

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Susan de Sola’s poems have appeared in many venues, such as the Hudson Review and PN Review, and in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. She is a winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize and the Frost Farm Prize. She holds a PhD in English from the Johns Hopkins University and has published essays and reviews as Susan de Sola Rodstein. Her photography is featured in the chapbook Little Blue Man. A native New Yorker, she lives near Amsterdam with her family.

Author: Rebecca Starks
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490427
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 116

View

Book Description

Rebecca Starks’s Time Is Always Now unfolds against a backdrop of nature, often permeated in unexpected ways with the human dynamics of family, neighborhood, and nation. Her poems convey the urgency within moments of transformation—whether seasonal, as in wilderness and garden; physical, as in the trajectory of youth, aging, and death; or political, as in the challenges of misgovernance and the environmental exigencies of our time. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a finely wrought, thought-provoking collection.

PRAISE FOR TIME IS ALWAYS NOW

Drawing from sources as wide-ranging as Emily Dickinson, Apocalypse Now, fairy tales, and social media, Rebecca Starks’s Time Is Always Now deftly balances intelligence and pathos, resisting easy dichotomies and judgments. As these fine poems insist, the present is relentless, and we are immersed: “No, not out of time; helplessly in it.” Ours is a country of guns; ours is a “middle-aged earth” in decline—and yet, we are here, witnessing, questioning. I am grateful for Starks’s voice in the present moment, and I’m grateful to have her poems to carry with me into the future, whatever it may bring.
  —Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Rebecca Starks writes with a sense that time can be stopped in a poem, lives suspended and drawn inward, even in the most aimless moments. There’s a wonderful clarity to Time Is Always Now, an electricity that feels bright and wild. It’s to be found in the roadsides and a robin’s “clutch,” in the retina that “registers pain,” in the sky at dusk and the “months of mud.” I greet these poems with so much enthusiasm—these poems that crave, clarify, and propose sublime ways to become refreshed in our most confused times.
  —David Biespiel (from the foreword), author of Republic Café

At one point, Rebecca Starks describes a winter hike, in which she crosses “sociable mouse hops, two feet together” and passes “a squirrel’s scramble at the base of a tree,/ then the bunched landings of a mustelid bound/ from the yawn under one log to another.” Several of her wonderful book’s qualities are evidenced here. If too many poets, in their ignorance, regard nature as a mere repository of metaphor, Starks, like Frost, is both knowledgeable and uncannily accurate about it. (“Yawn” is the perfect word, say, in this passage.) Her sinuous and heavily subordinated syntax is also suggestive of a mind with great range—geographical, thematic, and prosodic—though she can also, as, for instance, in “American Flag,” move by a cunning terseness.
  —Sydney Lea, author of The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rebecca Starks grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, earned a BA in English from Yale University and a PhD in English from Stanford University, and works as a freelance editor and as a teacher for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Baltimore Review, Ocean State Review, Slice Literary, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Winner of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and past winner of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, she is the founding editor-in-chief of Mud Season Review and a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop. She and her family live in a log cabin in the woods of Richmond, Vermont.

Author: Will Cordeiro
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490583
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 130

View

Book Description
Will Cordeiro's Trap Street travels a shifting landscape. Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations. Cordeiro's vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer. This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things. PRAISE FOR TRAP STREET The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur. Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream. What's left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this. These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there. I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a book both of witness and warning. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist. Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular. His declaration that "Earth's everything I am" runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding. -David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound "Not everything must have some cosmic meaning." That is the sort of red-wheelbarrow faith Will Cordeiro depends on as his adventurous eye records the variegated appearance of the natural and manmade world, no detail too small to merit commemoration. The scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus cited the "haecceitas" ("this-ness") of observed experience as one component in the quest for the divine, so there is every reason to regard Cordeiro's poems as bridging the gap between life's overlooked detritus and exalted vision itself. And visual acuity here is matched by a strenuous verbality, color-coordinated vowels informing chewable consonants in a lexicon ranging from "cattywampus" to "glumes" to "blear." It's a pied-beauty diction and syntax that remind me of Hopkins and Marianne Moore. We should all join in welcoming Will Cordeiro's amazing debut. -Alfred Corn, author of The Poem's Heartbeat ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Will Cordeiro has work published in Agni, Best New Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Offing, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer's Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. Will received an MFA and PhD from Cornell University. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Currently, Will lives in Flagstaff and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.

Author: Anna M. Evans
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490133
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 82

View

Book Description