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The Cosmic Purr is the first collection of original poetry from Aaron Poochigian, well-known for his translations of Sappho, Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes. From the mythical to everyday themes, from the landscape of North Dakota to scenes in a bar, at a marriage ceremony, before birth or before death, Poochigian's verse is enlightened by uncommonly fresh wisdom, and deployed in the delightfully masterful, elegant and naturally-flowing metrical forms his translations are known for.PRAISE FOR THE COSMIC PURR:Aaron Poochigian's technique is masterly, the tone tends to be tart, disillusioned, cryptic, and elegant, and it's easy to be beguiled by these poems' wit and bravura. But the pyrotechnics are used to serious ends, and the scenes that are fitfully illuminated, whether they occur in landscapes as quotidian as contemporary North Dakota or as otherworldly as mythical Greece, whether they are chilling or exhilarating, are always immediate in their reality, and they speak to the reader with a compelling cogency. ? Dick Davis Aaron Poochigian is both a classicist and a neo-classical poet. By this I mean that he prefers as subjects the common occasions of our lives and articulates them uncommonly, in verse rich with the kind of detail that becomes a style passed on in an act of friendship between him and the poets of the past who have served as his mentors. ? Charles Martin (from the "Foreword") It is a delight to have some of Aaron Poochigian's modern New York replies to famous Sappho poems. Reading them is like eavesdropping on a New York wise guy discussing the "night before" with a classical scholar: sexy, witty, learned, and moving. Worth hearing, worth re-reading, too. ? Diana Der-HovanessianWhat is the cosmic purr? Pussycat poet Aaron Poochigian is the one to show us in his ebullient lines. He returns where he started-to the northern plains-then spins on a dime to the wider world "where life was all night long / drinking and dancing, bursting into song." In "The Parlor" he nods ironically to his Armenian heritage, and a few pages later he lights an elegiac candle for a dying friend. A major translator from classical Greek, Poochigian offers in his own poetry a hip formality, a timeless sense of the contemporary, and when he brings the classics into this scene they live again as freshly as ever. ? David MasonABOUT THE AUTHOR:Aaron Poochigian was born in 1973. He attended Moorhead State University from 1991 to 1996 where he studied under the poets Tim Murphy, Dave Mason and Alan Sullivan. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota. After traveling and doing research in Greece on fellowship from 2003 to 2004, he earned a Ph.D. in Classics in 2006, and now lives and writes in New York City. His translations, with introduction and notes, of Sappho's poems andfragments were published by Penguin Classics in 2009. His translations of Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes appeared in the Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation in the spring of 2009, and Johns Hopkins University Press published his edition of Aratus' astronomical poem, The Phaenomena, with his introduction and notes, in the spring of 2010. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Arion, The Dark Horse, Poetry an

Sailing to Babylon is the first full-length collection from James Pollock. These are poems of exploration and discovery of the self and the universal. Closer to home, there is the schoolboy fascination with the English teacher; the grandmother's old Bible; a Dantean-style extended account of a hiking adventure with a young son, fully realized in terza rima. Further out in time and geography, Pollock muses on figures from Canadian history-explorers Henry Hudson, David Thompson, and John Franklin; pioneering literary theorist Northrop Frye; and pianist Glenn Gould. Each of these quests has accompanying trials or triumphs. This is a collection full of surprises and pleasures, with a treasure-chest mapped for discovery in "an image of the world/ made small enough to hold inside the mind." A book that has the power to take you "to the place/ exactly where you always meant to go."PRAISE FOR SAILING TO BABYLON:James Pollock is a poet of Northwest Passages, a learned Canadian poet with a splendid ear and a Romantic sensibility, a keen explorer of inner and outer states. Sailing to Babylon is not only a fully realized and accomplished work of art-it is also a noble book. - Edward HirschYou will hear in these poems something like the jouncing and ruckus of a wilderness traveler adjusting the gear on his back, steeling his resolve, finding his footings and heading off. In the end Pollock's departures are an exploration of that inward Northwest Passage where the borderlines themselves between real and imagined, the present and the past, the found and the lost, seem almost to dissolve-passages, as Pollock says, "breaking up within"-and where, in this anthem of mixed voices, our wondering where home is becomes our wandering where home is. . . . I would almost prefer to be the reviewer, or some boastful exegete revealing to readers one hundred years from now some of the untold treasures that, its many readers notwithstanding, lie hidden here still. - Jeffery Donaldson (from the "Foreword")The metaphysics of the pause, the transition, the image: James Pollock has the Tranströmer instinct, but he plays the music in his very own key. These are haunting, deeply digested, nearly always surprising poems. - Sven BirkertsABOUT THE AUTHOR:James Pollock grew up in southern Ontario, Canada. He graduated summa cum laude with an Honors B.A. in English literature and creative writing from York University in Toronto, and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, where he held several fellowships in poetry. He was a John Woods Scholar in poetry at the Prague Summer Program at Charles University in Prague, and a work-study scholar in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poems have been published in AGNI, The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, and more than a dozen other journals. His critical reviews have appeared in Contemporary Poetry Review, Books in Canada, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere, and a collection of his criticism, You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill. He is an Associate Professor at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he teaches poetry in the creative writing program. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter, 2011 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 the second issue of the print edition is here, highlighting works of the same superlative standard as presented all these years in the online edition, and, the recently released 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 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists.EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple.FEATURED ARTIST - Alper Çukur;(Interviewed by Sharon Passmore).FEATURED POET - David Mason;(Interviewed by David J. Rothman).FICTION - Gilbert Allen, Rachel Bentley, Bruce Bromley, Keith J. Powell, Mary Widdifield, Douglas Campbell.ESSAYS - Michael Cohen, Seree Cohen Zohar, André Naffis-Sahely, Frank Osen, Andrew Frisardi.BOOK REVIEWS - Stephen Collington.POETRY - Suzanne J. Doyle, Midge Goldberg, Catharine Savage Brosman, Amit Majmudar, Richard Wakefield, Philip Morre, Paul Bone, Maryann Corbett, Timothy Murphy, Alyce Miller, Kathryn Locey, Susan McLean, Rebecca Foust, Lyn Lifshin, Stephen Collington, George Witte, William Conelly, Lew Watts, Jean L. Kreiling, Susan McLean, John Beaton, Joshua Lavender, Catherine Chandler, Gabriel Spera, T.S. Kerrigan.

This Bed Our Bodies Shaped from April Lindner is a finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. This collection is a celebration of the universal human experience-childhood, puberty, parenthood, aging-from a uniquely personal and sensual perspective. Lindner's craft, which finds masterful and original expression in metrical and free verse, enlivens each experience until we seem part of the scene. Eavesdropping on this engagingly narrated life gives us startling new insights into our own.PRAISE FOR THIS BED OUR BODIES SHAPED:April Lindner's This Bed Our Bodies Shaped is a beautifully intimate and domestic book about the culture of family-what we bring to each other, boldly or tentatively, and what can never be known. Lindner pauses at the imprints we leave, what is buried under sand and snow, what returns to us again and again. Her poems are tender and fierce, startling in their excavations. ? Denise DuhamelApril Lindner's sublimely intelligent and compassionate poems make This Bed Our Bodies Shaped the kind of book that becomes your friend on a bedside table. Here is a poet you can always trust. She never sacrifices complex layers of emotion for a simple treatise. This slender volume follows the pilgrim's progress of girl into woman into lover into mother into maturity, in poems that both mark those thresholds and illuminate them with the brilliant specifics of a lived life. And the poet accomplishes all of this with the precision of a practiced harpist on the huge gold instrument of craft. April Lindner's poems work with a muscular silkiness. Reading them is like discerning a bicep through a transparent sleeve. ? Molly PeacockThere are beautiful collisions in these poems, collisions between vulnerability and unflinching looks at our human condition, its truths and contradictions. There is an earned strength here and this book's amplitude is heightened by terrific formal control (she knows her craft) and wild music. ? Thomas LuxAll the pleasures and pains of domestic life, of marriage and parenthood, love and loss, dailiness and major rites of passage, find their textures and music in the poems of April Lindner's new collection. Her subtle mastery demonstrates again and again that the body itself creates the form of the poem, as surely as the bodies of the lovers shape their bed. The craft of these beautifully made verses is both seamless and palpable. ? Mark JarmanABOUT THE AUTHOR:April Lindner's first poetry collection, Skin, received the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press. Her novel, Jane, a modernization of Jane Eyre, was published by Poppy (Little, Brown) in 2010; Catherine, a modernization of Wuthering Heights, is forthcoming in 2013. A professor of English at Saint Joseph's University, April lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania, with her husband and sons.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer, 2011 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 the second issue of the print edition is here, highlighting works of the same superlative standard as presented all these years in the online edition, and, the recently released 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 - Eleanor Leonne Bennett.FEATURED POET - Catharine Savage Brosman; (Interviewed by Timothy Murphy). FICTION - Deborah P. Bloch, Catherine Sharpe, Traci Chee.ESSAYS - Rachel Hadas, Andrew Waterman, David Mason.BOOK REVIEWS - Leslie Monsour, Alexander Pepple.POETRY - Reagan Upshaw, John Drury, Joanna Pearson, John Savoie, David Hedges, Brian Culhane, Rilke (Translated by Len Krisak), C. R. Resetarits, Emily Leithauser, Nicholas Friedman, Christine de Pisan (Translated by Maryann Corbett), Rory Waterman, Robert Cooperman, Mebane Robertson, Laura Heidy-Halberstein.

Barbara Ellen Sorensen's Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes embraces the many joys of spirit and flesh, while acknowledging that death is an ever-present shadow. Her lyrics sometime sear, sometime soar, and are rooted in nature and her lived environment-arroyos, tundra, riparian forests-and further abroad in Haiti and Milan. These poems sing of the body both beauteous and bountiful, and contrapuntally lament trials of illness and surgery. The spirit of her lost son pervades her musings. Incantatory and mystical, she offers us "bells and charms/ that only girls can cast out like handfuls of sugar/ across any universe,/ any threshold." This collection richly rewards its reader. Its release is an event to celebrate.PRAISE FOR COMPOSITIONS OF THE DEAD PLAYING FLUTES:Barbara Ellen Sorensen's Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes is a book of stunning wakefulness. For it is a wake, but at the same time a celebration, one that focuses on places where the dead were once most alive, places where we are most acutely seen and heard. Here they are deserts, seascapes, landscapes with families. Like the bird wings that so often lift this stunning debut, Sorensen's flight is full of gravity: "One day you are as light/ as a bird, and then/ you are not." We stay aloft by living, by insisting on the protean body of the world. Sorensen's gift is elegy's clear song, how it may conjure grace from serious illness, car crash, the loss of a child. "The universe bears no flatness. Even its horizon is curved toward repetition. Your death is a horizon. I run to slip over its edge." Yet we don't, we stay. By honoring, each to each, our essential complexity, Sorensen reminds us love's true service is survival.-Matthew CoopermanThese poems are attentive, scrupulous, and transforming, as they range from the sensuous to the spiritual . . . Opened in body and spirit, the poet embraces her worlds, and she offers back this poetry, which shimmers in its urgent, delicate balance.-Veronica Patterson (from the foreword)Barbara Ellen Sorensen is a lyric poet in the sense that any fabulist might be called lyric-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. Mystic, mythographer, trickster and elegiast, Sorensen engages subjects that would be ashes in the mouth of a lesser poet-relief work in Haiti, brain surgery, and most devastatingly, the death of a son-with Orphic transformation and the deep truth of stories we tell ourselves by the fire to keep ourselves alive. From the formal mastery of poems like "My Lithium, My Heart" to the exquisite free verse of "Doubting Cremation" ("the beauty of a body/ torn twice from mine, because all mothers/ repeat the births of children who die"), Sorensen gives us, in her Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes, the record of her epic travels, her trips to the underworld, and along with that, the words that will save us.-Suzanne PaolaABOUT THE AUTHOR:Barbara Ellen Sorensen is former senior editor of Winds of Change magazine, the flagship publication for the American Indian Science & Engineering Society. She now freelances for The Tribal College Journal and writes for the National Indian Child Welfare Association. Sorensen's chapbook, Song from the Deep Middle Brain (Mainstreet Rag, 2010), was a Colorado Book Award finalist. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her memoir piece, Ghostflower & Wind (Drunken Boat, 2012). An interview with her can be found in Fringe magazine (spring, 2012). Her undergraduate degree in English is from the University of Iowa; her graduate degree in creative writing is from Regis University.

This is the much anticipated inaugural print edition of Able Muse Review. It''s an issue filled with the usual masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse. Thus, after more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse begins a bold new chapter with this print edition, highlighting works of the same superlative standard as presented all these years in the online edition, and, the recently released 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 — Massimo Sbreni.FEATURED POET — Richard Percival Lister;   (Interviewed by Steve Bucknell).MEMOIR (on R.P. Lister) — Steve Bucknell.FICTION — Nancy Lou Canyon, Emily Cutler, Marge Lurie.ESSAYS — Peter Filkins, Stephen Collington, Marilyn L. Taylor. BOOK REVIEWS — Julie Stoner, John Whitworth.POETRY — Catharine Savage Brosman, Catherine Tufariello, David Alpaugh, Ned Balbo, Steven Winn, Leslie Monsour, Rebecca Foust, Ted Mc Carthy, Gail White, J. Patrick Lewis, Kim Bridgford, Wendy Videlock, Peter Austin, Catherine Chandler, Diane Seuss, Susan McLean, Jamie Iredell, Maryann Corbett, John Slater, John Beaton, Gilbert Wesley Purdy, Frank Osen, Trina L. Drotar, Heather Hallberg Yanda, Richard Meyer, Kevin Corbett.

Nevertheless is the acclaimed first full-length poetry collection from American poet, Wendy Videlock. These are highly original poems written in Videlock's unique style and inimitable voice. They cover the gamut from fun, quirky, witty, to wise, in the backdrop of the slopes of the American West, through the gradients of human experience. PRAISE FOR NEVERTHELESS: Mother Goose jacked up on something barely legal? No, it's Wendy Videlock, bewitching poet of the West, sister to those who have "failed to walk on water." There is a formal zing to these poems of anarchy and grace. Videlock reminds us that serious poetry can be fun to read. Somehow, too, she has smuggled in a bag of wisdom. ? David Mason Videlock is a magician of play and pleasures, wisdom being not the least of these. ? A.E. Stallings (from the "Foreword") "Don't ask directions of me, my friend," concludes one of Wendy Videlock's poems. As a dweller of the slopes, she knows that there are only two real directions?up and down. In one lies the realm of myth?ancient, untouched, pure. In the other reside chronicles of daily life that too often substitute for poetry. On the slopes, we encounter the confluence of quotidian and ideal that constitutes true poetry. Even a witty crowd-pleaser like "What Humans Do" doesn't allow itself to slip to the level of sheer mechanics; it ends with as much transcendence as any of us are likely to know. Nevertheless is a first collection to be reckoned with. ? R.S. Gwynn Wendy Videlock is a shapeshifter. Hers is a delicate gift to die for. Read this book. ? Timothy Murphy ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wendy Videlock was born in a raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She drifted many a year, and now lives on the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband, two children, and their domesticated coyote. In recent years her work has appeared widely, most notably and most regularly in Poetry.

Lines of Flight is the first full-length collection from Catherine Chandler, an acclaimed American poet of quiet elegance whose simple style belies the range and depth of her poems. She is equally at ease with poems of nature as with those of people, relationships, landscapes and realms¿the domestic, the foreign, even those scanning the vast unknown of space or the esoterica of science. These poems, carefully crafted with formal dexterity in contemporary idiom, are deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as the villanelle, sapphic, ballad, pantoum, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet¿Chandler's specialty, for which she won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. PRAISE FOR LINES OF FLIGHT: Catherine Chandler's poems¿I think particularly of the sonnet "Vermont Passage"¿offer the reader a plain eloquence, a keen eye, and a graceful development of thought. Elsewhere in this fine book, she puts her gifts at the service of wit, as in the little anti-poetic poem "Supernova." Lines of Flight is altogether a lively performance. ¿ Richard WilburOne of the things that poetry¿when it's very good¿does better than anything else is to suggest conflicting things at the same time and confront the reader with the possibility that both may be true. This book, which is extraordinarily good, does that to perfection. ¿ Rhina P. Espaillat (from the "Foreword")Catherine Chandler's Lines of Flight is a marvelously accomplished first collection. Even to call it a 'first collection' seems somehow misleading; it is a first collection as Housman's A Shropshire Lad was. These are poems that have been long meditated and patiently crafted; they are distillations of experience captured in exquisite measures. There seems to be no form of which Catherine Chandler is not a master, from quatrains and Sapphics to ballads and pantoums. She is an especially brilliant sonneteer. Her formal artistry is not on display for its own sake but is employed with often lacerating effect to probe "the hush/of who I am." These are poems steeped in the sorrows of lucidity. At the same time, she has a subtle eye for landscapes and foreign vistas, from Ushuaia to (even more exotic) Poughkeepsie. As she puts it, "Some things she loves for where they are." Her poems on natural things, particularly those on birds, are alive with the rush of wings. For, though she modestly denies it, she is a poet who can "explicate the texture of the air." Poem after poem offers what she calls "fugitive vignettes" and yet, despite her ironic title, there's nothing fugitive about her verse. These beautiful poems have been made to last. ¿ Eric OrmsbyIn Lines of Flight, we hear an engaging and authoritative new voice. Catherine Chandler displays a dazzling command of poetic forms, writing skillfully in the sonnet, ballad stanza, rondel, villanelle, cento, tercets¿but to enjoy her work, the reader doesn't have to be a fan of form. A keen observer of the natural world, she can also capture human life in all its harsh crudity (see "Boots" or "To the Man on Mansfield Street"). She writes with drive and force, and yet is able to convey what she calls "the delicate forensics of the heart." Her instrument has many strings. She looks to me like a poet of major promise. ¿ X.J. KennedyABOUT THE AUTHOR: Catherine Chandler, an American poet born in New York City and raised in Pennsylvania, completed her graduate studies at McGill Uni

Sea Level Rising, John Philip Drury's fourth collection, revels in water-flowing through rivers, splashing on quays and docked vessels, the wake of speeding boats, the elusive tang of sea salt in the heart of the prairie, even the water of baptism that rebirths the believer. The uplifting lure of water, as with a pair of honeymooners in Venice, may inspire a love "eager to divorce/ anything impeding its energy." Our state of being might mirror water's when "everything's in flux, repeated spasms/ of wake and wave, bright sun, reflecting pool,/ surges made up of intricate detail." The waves of music, like those of water, are also prominent in the musings of this collection, where that which "rises and returns/ approaches music, a blessing/ beyond sound." These are masterfully crafted poems of uncommon inspiration, and they whelm with a celebration and longing for that which ebbs or flows inside us. PRAISE FOR SEA LEVEL RISING:Sea Level Rising is about a lot of things, all in some way the same mystery-why we love tidal waters, why we feel a kinship with the pulse and ebb of time and emptiness, why we feel most alive when we stand at the fractal edges of perception, why the singing of a good poem evokes all those correspondences we can't help loving. John Philip Drury's new poems will please many and please often as he celebrates, and with mastery, the inexhaustible waters before and within each of us. -Dave Smith, author of Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005-2010With candor and a close eye, Drury introduces us to a world of love and literature, nostalgia and new experiences-a world where water pervades everything: a constant and comforting reminder that what we depend on is, like us, also always in flux. Drury is deft at numerous forms, with a delicate touch. You can become so swept up in a poem you may not recognize it as a sonnet until you reach its resounding couplet; but, the beauty of the form-the force of its rhymes and the rapture of their song-has resonated since the opening lines and in all the energy that follows. That's the wonder of this collection: the "film of beauty, tides that keep on rising," as Drury writes. Sea Level Rising is an amazing achievement. It should not be missed. -Erica Dawson, author of The Small Blades HurtJohn Philip Drury is a Marylander; it makes all the difference. The ever-changing sea defines these poems; Drury explores impermanence-destiny, the future, love, fame, desire-anchored by a rock-solid formal mastery. Land and sea interpenetrate here-loom up, fall away-transmuting one into the other, a way of seeing. His favorite city is Venice, a perfect metaphor for a sensibility too large to be only one thing or its opposite. The masks and play of that ancient meeting place of land, sky and sea divert us from the serious business of its survival-and that might be a good way to describe Drury's art. In impermanence, through our art, we survive. -James Cummins, author of Still Some CakeABOUT THE AUTHOR:John Philip Drury is the author of three previous books of poetry: The Refugee Camp (Turning Point Books, 2011), Burning the Aspern Papers (Miami University Press, 2003), and The Disappearing Town (Miami University Press, 2000). He has also written The Poetry Dictionary and Creating Poetry, both published by Writer's Digest Books. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, two Ohio Arts Council grants, an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. He is a Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati.

Life in the Second Circle is the first collection from Michael Cantor, finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. Cantor's poetry globe-trots in time and place. It teems with such culturally diverse characters and scenes as Genghis Khan and Muhammad Ali; a pithy mise-en-scène of a Venice travelogue; Brighton Beach in Florida and its natives or turistas; and what can happen in Japan on tatami mats or behind shoji screens, whether you're a geisha or samurai or gaijin. His themes span the mystical to the hard-edged and "badass,¿ fluently deployed in formal poems in received or nonce forms and free verse. From the narrative to the imagistic and even the surreal, Cantor's versecraft is eclectic, brimming with wit and wisdom, and realized with the craft of a master storyteller. He has created a collection of unique pleasures not to be missed.PRAISE FOR LIFE IN THE SECOND CIRCLE:Dante¿s second circle of hell was reserved for sins of lust, but Cantor¿s narrator does not judge his infernal cast of characters; rather, he causes us to identify with their essential human neediness. What¿s more, he does so through a cinematic gift for storytelling and a mastery of poetic form. ? Julie KaneMichael Cantor uses words to paint and sculpt the world. He writes the world toöwhich I don¿t say as an afterthought, since verbal wit is Cantor¿s forte. Life in the Second Circle is a sensory kaleidoscope where the poems are more like movies. ? Deborah Warren (from the ¿Foreword¿) To be called ¿a poet¿s poet¿ passes for a compliment among poets. Michael Cantor is another, rarer kind of poet¿let¿s say ¿a novelist¿s poet.¿ This poet knows things that writers of fiction know about writing, and that other poets ignore at their peril. This extraordinary collection is testament to his unaffected generosity and genuine interest in other people, qualities that make him good company in person and in print. ? Alfred NicolThis is not your mother¿s book of poems. ? Wendy VidelockLike Muhammad Ali, one of the ¿Box Men¿ he celebrates in a virtuosic crown of sonnets, Cantor is a master of floating like a butterfly in a small, roped-off space. In his hands the most formidably difficult forms¿villanelles, triolets, Petrarchan sonnets, sestinas, ballades, and equally rigorous stanzas of his own invention¿become spurs to imaginative freedom. Like the vividly drawn characters who populate Life in the Second Circle, we are constantly reminded that one never knows where life will go, or how or when or where. But it¿s a pleasure to be along for the ride. ? Catherine TufarielloABOUT THE AUTHOR:Michael Cantor¿s work has appeared in Measure, The Dark Ho

Dirge for an Imaginary World from Matthew Buckley Smith is the winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award, selected by Andrew Hudgins. These are poems of breathtaking craftsmanship that find inspiration in the simplicity of the quotidian, or the perplexity of the grand. Smith is equally at ease musing about Neanderthals or God as he is with a ballet exam or highway medians. These poems of personal and universal introspection are filled with grace, and sparkle with abundant intelligence and wit. This masterful debut collection is an event to celebrate.PRAISE FOR DIRGE FOR AN IMAGINARY WORLD:Wildness and precision and passion balanced with wit-there are the hallmarks of Matthew Buckley Smith's superb Dirge for an Imaginary World. In subjects great ("For the Neanderthals") and small made great ("For the College Football Mascots"), the comic is rich with serious intent and gravity lightened with discerning wit. But only a poet who lifts heavy and unwieldy subjects-death, lost love, the absence of god-knows the imperatives of graceful balance. - Andrew Hudgins (Judge, 2011 Able Muse Book Award) In this deeply impressive debut volume of poetry, Dirge for an Imaginary World, Matthew Buckley Smith delivers a remarkable range of deft formal schemes, temporal movements, and varied settings. We encounter sonnets, couplets, quatrains, Sapphics, sestets and so forth written with a slick, delightful merging of technical expertise and smooth contemporary rhythms. The range of subjects is equally and as charmingly eclectic, from Neanderthals, Dante, Vermeer, for instance, to College Football Mascots, Highway Mediums, and Spring Ballet Exams. Mental and linguistic agility generously challenge the reader in poem after poem. - Greg Williamson (from the "Foreword")"If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst," wrote Thomas Hardy, whose spirit moves through the fine poems of Matthew Buckley Smith's debut collection. Like his blast-beruffled predecessor, Smith braves a clear-eyed look at our fallen world, mourning in elegantly precise language the sorrows inherent in "set(ting) out to map a promised land/ Out of reach and always just at hand," but also wishing great mercy upon us travelers failed and failing. These are poems full of both reckoning and grace, made all the more beautiful for their humane wisdom. Dirge for an Imaginary World is immensely impressive. - Carrie JerrellABOUT THE AUTHOR:Matthew Buckley Smith was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his MFA in poetry at the Johns Hopkins University. His poems have appeared, or will soon appear in various magazines, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, The Alabama Literary Review, Think Journal, and Best American Poetry 2011. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Joanna.

A Vertical Mile from Richard Wakefield is a finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. Keenly observed themes about people and the land they live in show a profound sense of awe before natural beauty and a love of country life, while recognizing the effect of indifference and inexorable technological advancement. Included are poems about childhood, seasonal changes, mountain climbing, religion and its questions and doubts, life and death, human origins. These poems of stunning artistry show Wakefield in complete command of his craft. This a memorable collection whose insights and pleasures are not to be missed.PRAISE FOR A VERTICAL MILE:Deeply rooted in the human history and natural order of his native state, Richard Wakefield's A Vertical Mile depicts life in rural Washington-people, animals, plants, geological formations, the weather and the seasons. Building on his powerful and impressive first collection East of Early Winters, Wakefield, in A Vertical Mile, has now firmly established himself as one of America's foremost formal poets. In their memorable presentation by way of deftly employed narrative, meter, rhyme, metaphor, symbol, and diction, the poems in this new collection, once read, cannot be easily dislodged from the mind. That, in itself, is evidence that Wakefield's best poems are a permanent addition to American letters. - David MiddletonRichard Wakefield crafts his verse to exacting standards yet keeps it uncontrived. Throughout A Vertical Mile, Wakefield shows us much about ourselves and the various worlds we inhabit, often of our own making. What he reveals may be sobering or amusing, uplifting or distressing. But, carried by a voice as versatile as the intelligence behind it, it is sure to surprise and delight us as well. - David Sanders (from the "Foreword")Richard Wakefield writes with a rare metrical skill that calls to mind the poetry of Robert Frost, and like Frost he tells intricate and compelling stories about ordinary people living close to the land. But there's nothing nostalgic here. There's compassion, and decency, but never an easy answer. Wakefield's choice of conventional form is a wry and subtle comment on the contemporary moment, and his mastery of that form raises his work above all the chaos and fads. No, these poems are not nostalgic. They are timeless. - Chris AndersonThe arc of discovery is what one traverses in Richard Wakefield's poetry. It may be a remembered seascape made new by the dust of familial ashes or a lost town, covered by a century of a forest's reclaiming growth. As a poet of the outdoors-one who sees and, seeing, makes new what he has seen-Wakefield is unsurpassed. - R.S. GwynnABOUT THE AUTHOR:Richard Wakefield, born in Renton, Washington, in 1952, earned his Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of Washington-Seattle with a dissertation on the poetry of Robert Frost. For nearly thirty years he has taught literature and composition at Tacoma Community College and the University of Washington-Tacoma. For over twenty-five years he has been a reviewer of fiction, literature, biography, and literary criticism for the Seattle Times. His poetry collection, East of Early Winters (University of Evansville Press, 2006), received the Richard Wilbur Award. His poem "Petrarch" won the 2010 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. He and his wife, Catherine, have been married thirty-nine years and have two grown daughters.

Maryann Corbett's second full-length collection, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, draws on profound experience of deep winter in the lived environment, while keeping alive faith that the thaw will come and bring with it the bloom of "uncountable rows of petals." The themes of this finalist for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award range from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Corbett's keen eye brings to focus uncommon detail. Her masterful technical repertoire spans received forms, metrical inventiveness, and free verse. This is poetry that amply rewards the reader with its boundless imagination, insight and visionary delight.PRAISE FOR CREDO FOR THE CHECKOUT LINE IN WINTER:The crafted poems in Maryann Corbett's new book are vibrant. She is a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Each poem surprises. Read her poems and feel the howling snow, the mud, and the jubilance of the first warm fertile spring days. -Willis BarnstoneWhat 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)Corbett is as comfortable and affecting within the tight confines of the Old English alliterative meter ("Cold Case") and the Sapphic stanza ("Paint Store") as she is with her supple blank verse and terza rima. Yet never does her rigorous craft interfere with the thoughtful, insightful content of these poems. A stunning collection, from one of America's most gifted contemporary poets. -Marilyn L. TaylorDo not dismiss this collection as "domestic poetry," "women's verse." Though grounded in seasonal rhythms and familiar settings, it is as vigorous, as reflective, as important as any man's. Sharply visual, skillfully and cleverly crafted, her poems draw out essences, "concentrated" and persisting. "Beauty changes us,/ calling up wonder from our deepest selves/ to its right place." -Catharine Savage BrosmanThese masterful poems announce themselves as winter pieces, and indeed they are so full of sleet and snow that readers may wish to dress warmly. But Corbett's winter, a season when "dull forms come in the mail" and we eat "tasteless, stone-hard, gassed tomatoes," is always lushly haunted by the other seasons, the way a house in one of her poems is fronted by a "three-season porch." Corbett is one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry, and this is one of the best new collections I've read in years. -Geoffrey BrockABOUT THE AUTHOR:Maryann Corbett grew up in McLean, Virginia. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota and is the author of Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012), and the chapbooks Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House) and Dissonance (Scienter Press). Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in River Styx, Atlanta Review, Rattle e-issues, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, and others. Her poems have have won the Lyric Memorial Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and works for the Minnesota Legislature. She is married to John Corbett, a teacher of statistics and mathematics, and they have two grown children.

All the Wasted Beauty of the World, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, extols the beautiful as readily as it expounds on the blemished. The reasoned commingles with the rambunctious, as with the speaker who declares that "our lives span diaper to diaper,/ and in between we piss on anyone/ we can." Little escapes notice in these poems of gutsy realism and formal deftness-the speaker in "Bellefontaine Cemetery" exhorts teens to "party on people's graves" and have "a few close shaves with county sheriffs," the carcass of a Ford truck intrudes on a hiking trail's gully, the homeless are lullabied to "find rest behind our dumpster/ . . . score a fifth of bourbon/ and find your stomach full." Richard Newman brings us a collection that prods and soars with the grit and beauty of the real world.PRAISE FOR ALL THE WASTED BEAUTY OF THE WORLD:All the Wasted Beauty of the World is masterful and magnetic, from the "galaxy of gnats" hovering in the St. Louis twilight to the way a backwoods junkyard "gnaws on a pile of old Ford bones." He sees a group of bored high school kids with "nothing to lose/ but stupid summer jobs and innocence," and captures with perfect acuity how "September rain in streetlight/ silvers the cypress needles, scatters new dimes/ among the nuisance alley mulberry trees." Newman's poems, with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible portraits of life in the cheap bars, back alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, surprise a hunger in us for a language larger, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than daily speech.-George Bilgere, author of ImperialThe poems in All the Wasted Beauty of the World, are heady explorers. They roam from Lost Man Pass to Benton Park, from downtown St. Louis to Southern Indiana, all the while balancing gorgeous musicality with lyric originality. In the midst of the wandering, there is longing in these poems-for place, for order, for morning. There is urgency, too, and beauty, wasted and otherwise, in places we don't always expect it. Newman is a bold and masterful formalist in a free-verse world, and he uses sonnets, aubades, villanelles, and odes to reconcile the geographies of the interior and exterior. Again and again, this collection makes us recalibrate our true north and forces us to reconsider the world for all of the unpredictable places where we can find beauty.-Adrian Matejka, author of The Big SmokeNewman uses the power of recollection and imagery to craft odes, sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and free verse with titles like "Four Kids Pissing off the Overpass after a Cardinals Game." Each poem calls our attention to a rough-and-tumble, everyday America we often drive past but overlook. All the Wasted Beauty of the World returns us to the real and, consequently, the new by putting on the brakes and asking us to look, if only briefly, beyond our rear-views.-Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of MenABOUT THE AUTHOR:Richard Newman is the author of the poetry collections Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009) and Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005), as well as several poetry chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, New Letters, Poems & Plays, Poetry Daily, The Sun, Unsplendid, Verse Daily, and many other periodicals and anthologies. His poem "Bellefontaine Cemetery" won first place in The 2010 Ledge Poetry Awards. He lives in St. Louis, where he reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and edits River Styx.