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This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2023/2024 issue, Number 31. 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).Includes the winning stories and poems from the 2023 Able Muse contest (Able Muse Write Prize) winners and finalists.". . . [ 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: WITH THE 2023 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalistsEDITORIAL - Alexander PeppleFEATURED ART - An Active Family ThemeFEATURED POET - Ned Balbo;(Interviewed by Stephen Kampa)FICTION: W Goodwin, Annie ShepherdESSAYS: Dylan Night, Roy Isen, Jean RoverBOOK REVIEWS: Brooke Clark, Maryann Corbett, Reagan UpshawPOETRY: Hilary Biehl, E. Hume Covey, Malcolm Farley, Kelly Scott Franklin, Rachel Hadas, David M. Katz, Jennifer Keith, David Lehman, Forester McClatchey, Jane McKinley, Susan McLean, Matthew Buckley Smith, Maura Stanton, N. S. Thompson, Christopher R. Vaughan, Wendy Videlock

Through their cinematic storytelling, the poems in John Philip Drury's The Teller's Cage swell the heart and the imagination. The book opens with baseball and culminates with persona poems starring the poet's mother, along the way unraveling factual and fantastical chronicles in enchanting locales. Drury's formal prowess is on display throughout this versified blockbuster.PRAISE FOR THE TELLER'S CAGE:In John Philip Drury's The Teller's Cage, in a richly textured tableau in the vein of the late Richard Howard's work, the speaker first reflects upon his younger life only to then, astonishingly, assume the perspective of his mother in a series of masterful persona poems. But most of all, one appreciates the ingeniously formal thrills of these very personal and alive poems. Drury's latest collection presents a uniquely visceral dream of recollection, into which you, dear reader, have been offered the gift of entrance.-Cate Marvin, author of Event Horizon"We're still chameleons who can't help changing," writes John Philip Drury in this new collection that rings the changes on American speech and classical verse forms. Park, Echo, dark, deco: Drury masters the mysteries of rhyme with vernacular charm, both hard rhyme and-legion, moody, curmudgeon, embody-slant. He is also adept at incorporating history into his poems-close to home and further afield. It all fits naturally, thanks to his flexible style and broad-minded curiosity. Yet we sense the presiding spirit of the collection in his tender, deeply lived and felt poems of love and friendship. Drury's formal restlessness, his skill at poetic shapeshifting, offers us a "lexicon of things that morph," moving, in the final poem of each section, from poetry to cinematography as he scripts imaginary films for the theater of the mind. -Amit Majmudar, author of Twin A"Imaginary movies," as John Philip Drury calls the poems in The Teller's Cage, just might be the best movies, at least in the hands of such a formally virtuosic auteur. With historical reach that takes in the brutality of seventeenth-century colonialism, the poet's mother's closeted love in the mid-twentieth century, and the devastating consequences of history in contemporary Venice, and with characters from a renaissance composer to John Waters, Drury's poems explore the imagination as our most essential way of facing facts. They defeat the easiness of nostalgia by insisting on the complexity of circumstances, as if the baroque and the realistic were quite happily sharing a beer after work.-Jordan Smith, author of Little Black TrainABOUT THE AUTHOR:John Philip Drury is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, and Sea Level Rising-from Able Muse Press. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary, both from Writer's Digest Books. His awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council grants, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. He was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and grew up in Bethesda. He earned degrees from Stony Brook University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for thirty-seven years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.

Stephen Kampa's World Too Loud to Hear confronts today's zeitgeist of dark social norms online or off. Our litany of individual and collective shortcomings is laid bare or castigated-as, for instance, with obligations we abhor, avoid, and "can't wait / to pass down to the upstart generations." The delivery ranges from straight or subtle to rants and execrations, while the settings range from historic and current affairs to the imaginary, dystopian, sci-fi, or surrealistic. This sui generis collection is fearless in hope, with a sobering take on our acceleratingly fearful national and global trajectory.PRAISE FOR WORLD TOO LOUD TO HEAR:Stephen Kampa's World Too Loud to Hear is a book about America's "slow-motion, decades-long cascade / of violence . . ."-gun violence by and against children, violence of tech-driven accelerating change, and violence that permeates almost every aspect of our online lives. These amazing poems manage to be at once outraged and witty, inventive and passionate, nuanced and blunt. I can't think of another book that captures so completely the lunatic reality of self-destruction. Stephen Kampa is fabulous poet, and this is a fabulous and important book.-Alan Shapiro, author of Proceed to Check Out and Against TranslationStephen Kampa's World Too Loud to Hear takes on the noise of the twenty-first century with a furious love and attention. The poems in this book lay out our terrible addictions-to gun violence, to scientism, to screens, to empty celebrity, to social division, to anger itself. But they also show us what remains worth saving from those evils: children, magic, and mystery. These poems delight equally in novel syllabic stanzas, calm iambics, and drumming accentuals, and they ratchet up poetic form to the tension of a crossbow, with the same deadly aim. They use change-up rhyme patterns, sonics, wordplay, and narrative drama to keep us tumbling forward, through etymology and child abuse, homage and political hackery, near-despair and struggling faith. And they often arrive at the sort of poetic closure that makes a reader freeze and gasp.-Maryann Corbett, author of In Code and Street ViewJuggling Horatian and Juvenalian satire with surgical wit and polemical yet coy imbalances, Stephen Kampa's speakers are the needling social critics, cultural anthropologists, and litigator-jesters. I have not read a collection of poetry that better tackles social injustices and apathies, gun violence, religious hypocrisy, climate change, and our subservience to technology. Kampa shows us ourselves: combing the Almighty WebMD to wrangle with our psychosomatic homunculi, constructing our digital personae and elevating our experiences to impress other inflated personae, and being lured into divisiveness by cartoonish political buffoonery. In this World Too Loud to Hear, Kampa reminds us through his maw-opening critiques and funhouse mirrors that we have lost our benevolence and are becoming untethered from the one objective truth from which we humans can find insights: the natural world.-Adam Vines, author of Lures and Out of SpeechABOUT THE AUTHOR:Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible, Bachelor Pad, Articulate as Rain, and World Too Loud to Hear. He is a winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Collins Prize, and the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry. He has been a resident at Art342 and at the Amy Clampitt House. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry. He has also worked as a musician and appears on multiple albums from WildRoots Records.

The forestry term wolf tree for a large specimen with spreading branches-"prominent and self-isolating," just as "[b]eing a good diabetic is lonely work"-is a central conceit in Katie Hartsock's second full-length collection, Wolf Trees. Hartsock muses on classical and modern figures (such as Hermes, Thetis, John the Baptist, Wyatt Earp, Dervla Murphy, Jane Jacobs), family, motherhood, the wolf and coywolf, glucose tablets, and the lot of the diabetic "in a body that would have perished years / ago" if not for medical advances. Through loss and hope, trials and triumphs, and the challenges and blessings of life and living, Katie Hartsock's Wolf Trees uplifts the spirit.PRAISE FOR WOLF TREES:Expanding from breast milk, stretch marks, and memories of miniskirts to the Farnese Hercules, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and, beautifully, in "The Nipple Shield of Achilles," to the Iliad, Katie Hartsock's urgent and capacious poems contain multitudes. In unexpected and compelling ways, many of these poems reach from an intimate focus to the realm of myth and legend. Hartsock's vision makes her poems ramify like the archetypal tree of her title-shape-shifting, endlessly generative, and radiant with meaning.-Rachel Hadas, author of Love and Dread and Piece by PieceKatie Hartsock is one wonderful poet. She is the abundantly gifted, skilled, and generous keeper of world myths who is constantly cleaning, repairing, and representing ancient wisdom to us as new salve and fresh cure for the world as it is right now. Wolf Trees is a gorgeous gathering of poems from one of America's brightest poetic voices.-Lorna Goodison, author of Collected Poems and Supplying Salt and LightWolf trees are tall mature trees that are not like the other trees-they stand out from their surroundings. The poems in Katie Hartsock's new collection are as strong, as enduring, as outstanding as the trees from which the book takes its title. These poems are assured, well rooted but with a light touch even as they address some of the deepest concerns we humans face. Our connections to the world around us are ever rooted in bodies, always leaky, ever changing, flawed and beautiful not despite but in large part because of those openings, those "flaws." The poems in Wolf Trees are about the becoming that is the human life, and they help us in the journey that is our own becoming.-Jim Ferris, author of The Hospital Poems and Slouching Toward GuantanamoABOUT THE AUTHOR:Katie Hartsock is the author of two poetry collections, Wolf Trees (2023) and Bed of Impatiens (2016), both from Able Muse Press. Her poems appear widely, in journals such as Ecotone, Poetry, Kenyon Review, 32 Poems, the Threepenny Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Pleiades, Dappled Things, the New Criterion, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and their young sons.

In Strong Feather, Jennifer Reeser revisits the salient themes of Indigenous-her acclaimed, award-winning preceding poetry collection. While the poems in Strong Feather reprise the exposition of a Native American heritage juxtaposed with a mixed European ancestry, many of them center on a Native American female character of the author's creation-a poet/prophet/warrior of sorts. Displaying a masterful command of form throughout, Strong Feather also includes personal poems, translations, and tales from Cherokee and other indigenous traditions. The result is a spellbinding and uniquely engaging collection of storytelling, mythmaking, and inspirational musings, energized by a keenly interrogated mixed-race heritage.End of the winter, middle March,Waking, I find it beneath my quiltClinging to linens the hue of larch,Softer and whiter than milk when spilt-One petite feather. Its hollow "hilt"Pointing toward me, is curved and long,Slightly translucent, and at a tilt.How has this feather stayed so strong?. . . .PRAISE FOR STRONG FEATHER:What I love most about Jennifer Reeser's poems is their swagger. Not conceit (there's none of that) but rather a delightful confidence in her art and in her judgments. Maybe that's communicated by the title of her new book, before we even get to the first poem. Can a feather be strong? You better believe it.-John Wilson, Englewood Review of Books + Marginalia Review of BooksJennifer Reeser's Strong Feather continues her personal legacy of applying classical technique to make another world visible. Like Countee Cullen of the Harlem renaissance, she is a master of rhyming forms that present life beyond the expected edges of formal verse. Witness the marvelous "Shape Shifter," a Petrarchan sonnet like no other, or the stunning "The Courier du Bois and the Savage," an ekphrastic poem written as an English ode but conveying a modern message about equality. Her elegant use of rhyming couplets in "White Lady" concentrate the poem's illumination of contrasting lives. A hundred pages of such treasures will bring you lives you might not otherwise meet and pleasures you would otherwise miss.-Arthur Mortensen, Expansive Poetry OnlineABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Strong Feather (Able Muse Press, 2022), and Indigenous (Able Muse Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Poetry Book of 2019 by Englewood Review of Books. Reeser's poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, Light Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of European American and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana and now divides her time between Louisiana and her land on the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation of which her family is a part.

Ben Berman's Writing While Parenting explores what it means to pursue a creative passion alongside raising a family, how having children can make a parent both more vulnerable and more adventurous as an artist. Given how hectic parenting is, is it possible to balance a career and family, let alone find two minutes to pee without someone tugging your leg and asking to watch you "make bubbles"? How does one possibly find the time or energy to be creative?Spanning five years, these essays range from humorous moments (the seven-year-old daughter complaining that she "just got kicked in the weenie") to the more serious ones (finding two swastikas etched into the slide at the neighborhood playground). No matter its genesis, each piece thoughtfully examines the overlaps and the dissonance between the creative life and the procreative one. This is a witty, inspired, and illuminating collection for the writer, the parent, or both.PRAISE FOR WRITING WHILE PARENTING:Ben Berman's witty, brainy, soulful look at writing-while-parenting will speak to every parent-and every writer-committed to understanding the way that having kids raises the stakes for-and loosens the reins of-how we speak and write. What we blurt out, what we write down, the letters we help our children form, and those we hold ourselves back from forming for them-all matter. Every writer speaks to posterity, but Berman shows how parenthood brings that message-literally-home.-Elisa New, director and host of Poetry in AmericaWriting While Parenting, Ben Berman's wonderful new collection, is a striking work of wit, wisdom, and authenticity. His narratives read like micro-memoirs: deep meditations on marriage and family in dramatic structures "between song and thought." In addressing daily routines, dinner dates, and making M&M pancakes, these essays, like poetry, intertwine "imprecise meanings and [a] tangling of tones." This collection is as much about parenthood as it is process. For the writer, it is a reminder to see opportunity in every moment. I am enamored with Berman's care and precision with language and meaning. These essays are full of surprises, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary at every turn.-January O'Neil, author of RewildingBen Berman's collection reveals a writer who is an astute reader, one situated within the community of literature, referencing other texts in ways dialogic and fruitful to us, readers of his text. Here Berman knits a kinship of the poetic, the philosophical, the etymological, and the revelatory in essays remarkable for their scope, surprises, and sheer delights. The fundamental kinship of family and its metaphors is the beautiful beating heart of this book, and Berman's skill as a storyteller gives that heart amazing life.-Danielle Legros Georges, Boston Poet Laureate, 2015-2019ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ben Berman is the author of Writing While Parenting, Figuring in the Figure, and Strange Borderlands, all from Able Muse Press in 2022, 2017, 2012 respectively; and Then Again (Vine Leaves Press, 2018). He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has been shortlisted twice for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club, and Somerville Arts Council.Ben has been teaching for over twenty years and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.

This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2020/2021 issue, Number 29. 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).Includes the winning stories and poems from the 2021 Able Muse contest (Able Muse Write Prize) winners and finalists.". . . [ 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:WITH THE 2021 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalistsEDITORIAL - Alexander PeppleFEATURED ART - A Distance Theme.FEATURED POET - Rhina P. Espaillat;(Interviewed by Deborah Warren).FICTION -Amina Lolita Gautier, Randy Nelson, Jonathan StarkeESSAYS - Michelle Cacho-Negrete, Chidiebube onye Okohia, Mark Pearce, Joachim Stanley, N.S. ThompsonBOOK REVIEWS - Travis Biddick, Brooke ClarkPOETRY - Liz Ahl, Leo Aylen, Lee Harlin Bahan, Bruce Bennett, Hilary Biehl, John J. Brugaletta, Dan Campion, Sarah Carleton, Ted Charnley, Gregory Emilio, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Stephen Gibson, D. R. Goodman, Susan McLean, Angela Alaimo O''Donnell, Francesco Petrarca, Estill Pollock, Erica Reid, Mary Romero, Kelly Rowe, Leona Sevick, Michael Spence, Ann M. Thompson, Will Toedtman, Toni Treadway, E. D. Watson, Gail White, Steven Withrow

Terminal Park bears truthful and often wryly humorous witness to a wide range of human experience deployed masterfully with wit, empathy, and grace. Wakefield's portraits of life in rural Washington State are particularly vivid and compelling.

Fetch, Muse, Rebecca Starks second full-length collection of poetry, is a powerful account of events revolving around adopting, living with, and ultimately giving up a dog. In precisely crafted and moving poems of compassionate care, of sacrifice and inclusion, the accounts are by turns heartwarming and heartrending-how the dog Kismet was integrated into and became an important and beloved member of the family, and, ultimately lost, "memory burning [her] into brilliance." Along the way, understanding deepens of the dog as an individual, of our wilder inclinations, guiding toward a more informed attitude, to warmth given and received. This is a unique collection of longing and introspection, uncovering a closer sense of the life around us, our inner nature, our humanity.PRAISE FOR FETCH, MUSEThis book shows that the range of feelings that goes into taking on and then giving up a dog is as deep and wide an emotional swath as any we experience as people, which is to say non-dogs. The insights, confusions, misgivings, wary moments, and entangled joys are all here along with a steady self-scrutiny. We forget, we let go, but we don't forget the deep tie between dogs and humans and how crucial yet fraught that tie is. Fetch, Muse offers poetry of a very high order to apprehend matters that are basic to our flawed, yearning humanity. - Baron Wormser, Maine Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Tom o' VietnamWhat brims from this elegant collection? A sorrow both compassionate and contemplative, a sorrow wise and deep. Here, Rebecca Starks gives us poems spoken in direct address to her rescued dog named Kismet. "Fetch, Muse," she says, commanding the dog to ". . . do the work / of memory, dropping life at my feet . . ." And Kismet obeys. In mostly subverted, non-traditional sonnets, Starks's poems retrieve from memory the story of a rescue that is fated to ultimately fail. Rich with allusion, her work-with its wit and insight and music-salvages for us the story of her relationship with a creature whose very name means fate. - Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of UnderstoryFetch, Muse is a book of real poems with a real subject, a subject which is difficult to tackle successfully, and Rebecca Starks achieves that success. The poems, mostly unrhymned sonnets, muse on her wayward dog and on her family life. The dog is her true muse. There are many great lines I could quote, but here is the beginning line of a typical sonnet "Fetch, Muse, bring me back what I rejected," and ends with this memorable final line, "your fetch as long as your leash pulls you up." Powerful. - Greg Delanty, Guggenheim Fellow, author of No More TimeABOUT THE AUTHOR:Rebecca Starks grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and earned a BA in English from Yale University and a PhD in English from Stanford University. She works as a freelance editor and workshop leader. Her first book of poems, Time Is Always Now, was a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. 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 is a board member of Sundog Poetry Center. She lives with her family and two adopted dogs in a log cabin in the woods of Richmond, Vermont.

In exquisitely crafted poems, Len Krisak''s Say What You Will muses on a wide range of topics, in present-day and historic settings and relevance: ancient Tiberius, modern-day Halloween, cinema icons, and famous artwork, to name a few. Also included are accomplished translations that bring alive the meaning, feeling, and rhythm of the originals. These are poems delightfully wrought in masterful metrical poetry-nonce forms, sonnet, cento, quatrains, and others. This winner of the 2020 Able Muse Book Award is a collection filled with enlightenment, wonder, and inspiration.PRAISE FOR SAY WHAT YOU WILLWith unerring artistry, Len Krisak''s poems in Say What You Will extend an invitation with enormous erudition, sure, but equally with wit and charm, solemnity and grace, in this exquisite book.ΓÇâ ΓÇâ -Greg Williamson, author of A Most Marvelous Piece of LuckIn Len Krisak''s Say What You Will, a voice comes to us from out of the Midwest, by way of ancient Italy. A formidable translator of Vergil and Horace, Krisak is attuned to echoes lingering in those gorgeous classical ruins that will outlast our century''s bravest new structures. He''s also attuned to the here-and-now in all its incongruities, a place where (in Krisak''s hands) Chinese takeout turns out to rhyme with stakeout.ΓÇâ These are footloose poems, happily ambling here and there, so the reader is hardly surprised if on one page you''re in Russia and in another you''re contemplating the Boston subway, or if one of Vermeer''s silent beauties winds up beside the silent film star Louise Brooks.ΓÇâ Say What You Will is a smart and kindly book.ΓÇâ ΓÇâ -Brad Leithauser, 2020 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of Rhyme''s RoomsReaders should welcome Say What You Will, the newest book of accessible but challenging poems by Len Krisak. His subjects range from high culture to pop culture, and his well-crafted translations range from the ancient Greeks to Montale. This is one of the best collections of poetry in this pandemic year.ΓÇâ ΓÇâ -A. M. Juster, author of Wonder and WrathABOUT THE AUTHOR:Len Krisak graduated from the University of Michigan in 1970 and took his MA from Brandeis University in 1974. In Massachusetts, he worked as a textbook editor and English teacher at Brandeis, Northeastern University, Bentley University, and Stonehill College before retiring in 2010 to write poems and translate.

The Powow River Poets Anthology II continues the tradition of memorable poetry from the Powow River Poets. This group of uniquely talented, award-winning writers is centered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and beyond.

J. C. Todd's Beyond Repair bears vivid witness to the struggles for healing--both small- and large-scale--in global hotspots of conflict such as Hama, Syria, and vicinities, where a tenacious Air Force doctor was stationed. With precisely crafted poems, imbued with empathy and grace, Todd examines those who must continue with dailiness amidst horror and chaos, on and near the many "playing fields and killing / floors . . . / where some will say nothing / is left, not even names." Both the best and the worst of human nature are laid bare in a "FUBAR'd" war-zone "tour of racket / and ruin." This fierce and moving collection is a special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR BEYOND REPAIRJ. C. Todd's Beyond Repair is woven of war and aftermath. Survival lives in the blood-wit of each turn in this wrought collection, singing and daring the heart awake. This voice is refined to an edge, each word weighed before given grace to live on the page. Todd's collection possesses fortitude and reflection. The speaker grows whole through the act of witnessing. Leaps and associations feel calibrated as the reader finds oneself sizing up the angle of heart and head, becoming part of the accumulative turns--an accord of people, voices, places, times-and we confront what war does to one who has a capacity for grace.--Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner; author of Everyday Mojo Songs of EarthBearing unflinching witness to upheaval across borders and time, places where "nothing / is left, not even names," Todd's poems give voice to the oppressed and missing, asking "Without a speaker language what is it." Compassionate, questioning, she remains keenly aware of the challenges of representation, acknowledging how "beyond the cropped shot" the "background resists / insists." Here, an expectant mother learns of Hama's destruction, her baby "safe in the province / of [her] body." A riveting crown of sonnets chronicles a military doctor's grim struggles to heal during her "tour of racket / and ruin." In Damascus's suburbs, parents "caution, Try / not to die today." J. C. Todd's unforgettable voices and visions will leave you transformed forever.---Dilruba Ahmed, Bakeless Award winner; author of Bring Now the AngelsIn these powerful, impassioned poems of war's devastation, what counts is neither party nor nation, but only bodies and minds caught in modern warfare's mutilating gears. Eloquent in witness, with searing exactitude, J. C. Todd restores life's meaning-always war's first casualty. Filling the acronym PTS with substance--"memory a carnivore ravening the entrails / of castaway reason"--she takes us inside those who've served, the poet as faithfully vigilant as the Air Force doctor charged with care, even of those damaged "beyond repair."--Eleanor Wilner, Frost medalist; author of Before Our EyesABOUT THE AUTHOR:J. C. Todd is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently The Damages of Morning, a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist. Winner of the Rita Dove Prize in Poetry and twice a finalist for Poetry Society of America awards, she has received fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and artist residency programs including the Bemis Center. Her poems have appeared widely in journals such as the American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin, the Paris Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Philadelphia.

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 STREETThe 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 RailsplitterTrap 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 HeartbeatABOUT 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.

This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition - Winter 20120/21 issue, Number 28), a review of poetry, prose & art: with the winning and finalist story and poems from the 2020 Write Prize; with an International Theme fiction section.

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 TOSCAEllen 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 PaperEllen 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 GoneAs 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 PsalmABOUT 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.

Susan de Sola' Frozen Charlotte spans the breadth of human experience, going from celebration to lamentation, from gravity to lightheartedness, from quotidian scenarios to historic tumults, including the Holocaust.

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, S├úo 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 WISHESRob 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 PoemsOne 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 OutThe 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 ShirazABOUT THE AUTHOR:After working for three decades in film production, Rob Wright has now chosen to spend his time writing. He currently serves as associate fiction editor for Able Muse, and has been awarded three Fellowships in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has published fiction, reviews, and poetry in Able Muse, Angle, Big City Lit, the Evansville Review, Measure, Rattle, String Poet, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. A finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, he recently was awarded the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry and was honored to give a reading at the home of Frost in Derry, New Hampshire.

The Powow River Poets Anthology II continues the tradition of memorable poetry from the Powow River Poets. This group of uniquely talented, award-winning writers is centered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, but includes members from the Boston area and from as far away as New York and Maine. Twenty-seven poets are represented in this volume of the anthology, including Rhina P. Espaillat, A.M. Juster, and Deborah Warren. Here, find masterful poems in form and free verse, on an eclectic range of subjects spanning the domestic to the global, celebrations to mourning, the whimsical to the heartbreaking. It is especially a showcase of the formal prowess of these accomplished poets. The dazzling array of given and nonce forms, including blank verse, triolet, abecedarian, sonnet, villanelle, sestina, and more will inspire with many examples of craftsmanship heightening emotional engagement and insight.PRAISE FOR THE POWOW RIVER POETS ANTHOLOGY II:Dedicated to the late Powow River Poet, David Berman, The Powow River Poets Anthology II continues in the splendid tradition of the group’s previous tome, published in 2006. Twenty-seven poets touch on themes ranging from the simple joys of friendship, nature, and art, to the complex issues of faith and doubt, love and loss. Guffaw-inducing humor and biting wit abound, as well as solemn reflections on suicide, domestic violence, social injustice, betrayal, illness, aging, and death. In Rhina P. Espaillat’s beautiful villanelle, “Guidelines,” included in this collection, the poet wisely urges us to find something to love, perhaps “a line of verse . . . that feels like the world’s heart since time began.” Beyond question, the poems in The Powow River Poets Anthology II echo the world’s heart.   -Catherine Chandler, author of Pointing HomeIt might be far-fetched to suggest that the Muses have sprinkled a generous share of their gifts into the waters of the Powow River . . . [near] the historic town of Newburyport . . . where the Powow River Poets established their home base three decades ago-but how else to explain the lyric fluency, robust talent, and refreshing wit that consistently distinguish this group?   -Leslie Monsour (from the introduction), author of The House SitterThe Powow River Poets are a group known for their concern with the craftsmanship of verse, and for the formal dexterity and precision of their poems-qualities profusely exemplified in this new collection. As might be expected, there are tricky forms in abundance here-sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina-but what is so memorable about so many of the poems is their continual precision of observation and depth of nuanced feeling. To paraphrase Pope, come for the flow of reason, stay for the feast of soul. This is a really delightfully various and moving collection, one to browse happily in and return to often.   -Dick Davis, author of Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of ShirazABOUT THE AUTHOR:The Powow River Poets are a gathering of widely published, award-winning New England poets, centered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, but including members from the Boston area and from as far away as New York and Maine. More about the Powow River Poets can be found at powowriverpoets.com.