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** ~ THREE DAYS Only left before entry deadline in BOOK AWARD! **
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ABLE MUSE BOOK AWARD [5] (Poetry) - $1000 prize, plus book publication
Judge: Molly Peacock
Deadline: March 31, 2014
Read the guidelines and ENTER [5] now!
** ** NEW from ABLE MUSE PRESS [6] -- 2013 ABLE MUSE BOOK AWARD winner [6]***
I'm pleased to announce that Walking in on People [7], the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award -- selected by X.J. Kennedy-- and first full-length collection from Melissa Balmain is now available for pre-order from Able Muse Press [6] and worldwide from Amazon, [8] Barnes & Noble [9] and most popular distribution and retail channels (ISBN 978-1-927409-29-9). Or, just go to Melissa's website, www.melissabalmain.com [10], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [6]. Besides the traditional print edition, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Nobles NOOK, Apple iTunes/iBooks and Kobo and Google Play digital edition will be available soon.
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Walking in on People [7] - poems by Melissa Balmain
(with a Foreword by David Yezzi)
Praised in blurbs from Billy Collins, X.J. Kennedy, and Gail White--“Melissa Balmain’s poems add to the rhythmic bounce of light verse a darker, more cutting humor. The result is an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic.”
—Billy Collins“Walking in on People grabbed me with its very title, and it never let go. Poetry these days is rarely so entertaining, so beautifully crafted, so sharp of eye, yet so wise and warm of heart. Melissa Balmain keenly perceives faults in people and in our popular culture, with piercing wit but never bitterness. Don’t miss the wonderful ‘Lament,’ on what it takes to write a best seller, or ‘The Marital Bed,’ a love poem with naturalistic detail. She really commands her art. Indeed, I think any poet who rhymes lobsters and Jersey 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). . . read more [7]
** NEWLY RELEASED from ABLE MUSE PRESS [6] -- (February, 7) & now available ***
House Music [12], Ellen Kaufman's full-length debut collection of poetry from Able Muse Press [6] (February 7, 2014) and is now available for order worldwide through Amazon [13], Barnes & Nobles [13] and most popular distribution and retail channels here [13](ISBN 978-1-927409-25-1). Or, just go to Ellen's website, www.ellenkaufman.com [14], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [6]. Besides the traditional print edition, an Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and a Barnes & Nobles NOOK digital editions are also available now. An Apple iTunes/iBooks digital edition should also be available within days.
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House Music [12] - poems by Ellen Kaufman
(with a Foreword by Jennifer Barber):
Praised in blurbs from Willard Spiegelman, John Koethe, and Vijay Seshadri--In Ellen Kaufman’s House Music, which was a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, the everyday is remade into a luminous tapestry of intricate wordplay, delightful sound effects, and transcendent moments. Her observational skill about the commonplace is revelatory, with fresh insights on such wide-ranging subjects as construction work, native and exotic flora and fauna, a sewing machine and a piano handed down through generations, and a momentous visit to the doctor’s office. House Music is a wonderful debut collection from a uniquely inspired poet.
"The intelligence behind Ellen Kaufman’s wonderfully realized House Music is poised and observant, its reflections unfolding in sinuous sentences that are effortlessly elegant and deceptively plainspoken. The subjects and themes of her poems are various—the family romance, an encounter with a panhandler, the first moon landing—often taking the form of enigmatic vignettes and fables like “Sonatina” and “Thirteenth Night,” pervaded by a sense of the fragile contingency of life. House Musicis a brilliant and powerful debut."
—John Koethe. . . read more [12]
Order your copy now! [13]
** NEW from Able Muse Press [6]: New collection from Stephen Scaer - Pumpkin Chucking - Poems [15] ***
I'm pleased to announce that Pumpkin Chucking [16], a 2012 Able Muse Book Award finalist, and the first full-length collection from Stephen Scaer has been released by Able Muse Press [6] and is immediately available worldwide through Amazon [17], Barnes & Nobles [17] and most popular distribution and retail channels here [15] (ISBN 978-1-927409-12-1). Or, just go to Stephen's website, www.stephenscaer.com [18], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [6]. Besides the traditional print edition, an Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and a Barnes & Nobles NOOK digital editions are also available now. An Apple iTunes/iBooks digital edition should also be available within days.
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Pumpkin Chucking [15] - poems by Stephen Scaer
(with a Foreword by A.M. Juster):
Praised inblurbs from Deborah Warren, Richard Wakefield, and Richard Crawford --Stephen Scaer’s Pumpkin Chucking is a harvest of wit and enlightenment, gleaned from everyday situations. Scaer shows impressive formal dexterity, and inventive use of nonce and received forms—sonnet, double-dactyl, Old-English-style alliterative meter; he turns the limerick on its head as it transforms into a humor-laden meditative tool in sequences such as “Mid-Life Limericks” and “Classical Limericks.” Scaer’s delivery is immediate, simple but never simplistic, laying bare the human condition to reveal that “The triumphs that [we] seek/ are held for their own sake,/ and shower us with grace/ like petals on the grass.” This finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award is a rare achievement in its deft marriage of the lighthearted and sublime. It is a book to relish from start to finish.
"Stephen Scaer’s Pumpkin Chucking celebrates the New England landscape while still being universal . . . and it surprises us with wit in the winking way of Frost."
—A.M. Juster (from the foreword)
"This is a wonderful and entertaining book of poetry. Stephen Scaer’s poems are full of wit, sarcasm and humor. His subjects are familiar to many of us: parenting, tedious jobs, home repair, dealing with middle age. But his well-crafted verse—the rhymes alone are worth the price of admission—is much more than that. Reading the poems, I was reminded of the voice of Screwtape dispensing advice to his devil-in-training nephew in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters: the humor is aimed directly at that familiar reflection in the mirror. When I was done reading and admiring these poems, I was left feeling like the narrator standing by his grill smoking a rack of ribs in Scaer’s 'The Sacrifice of Cain': 'I wish I were a better man.' "
—Robert Crawford. . . read more [15]
Order your copy now! [17]
** NEW from Able Muse Press [6]: New collection from Carol Light - Heaven from Steam - Poems [19]***
I'm pleased to announce that Heaven from Steam [19], a 2012 Able Muse Book Award finalist, and the first full-length collection from Carol Light has been released by Able Muse Press [6] and is immediately available worldwide through Amazon [20], Barnes & Nobles [20] and most popular distribution and retail channels here [19] (ISBN 978-1-927409-18-3). Or, just go to Carol's website, www.carol-light.com [21], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [6]. Besides the traditional print edition, an Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and a Barnes & Nobles NOOK digital editions are also available now. An Apple iTunes/iBooks digital edition should also be available within days.
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Heaven from Steam [19] - Poems by Carol Light
(with a Foreword by Brad Leithauser):
Praised in blurbs from Jason Whitmarsh, Cody Walker, and Linda Bierds--Carol Light’s Heaven from Steam, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, moves effortlessly from the humorous to the serious, from mundane concerns to sublime. She writes as convincingly of carnal pleasures as of spiritual mysteries. Light’s playful energy is imbued with pleasing rhythms and sonic patterns. With surprising wordplay and associations, she renders complex vistas as understandable simplicities, finds fresh, inventive turns of phrase that will remain with the reader. Her multifarious themes include questions of faith, divorce, childbearing, cathedrals, the Pacific Northwest, the Prairies, Italy—especially Rome—and beyond. This visionary debut collection will delight the discerning lover of poetry.
"The book is marked by a lightness of touch. The overall effect is playful. . . . But she strikes another tone entirely in the crowning sonnet sequence, “Vicolo del Divino Amore” . . . the nimbleness with which she weaves and unweaves her lines and imagery around the birth of a yearned-for child."
—Brad Leithauser (from the foreword)"In one of his “Dream Song” poems, John Berryman writes, 'The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once.' Carol Light, in Heaven from Steam, performs arias again and again; her songs are equal parts rapturous ('the sun ignites the lantern world') and disquieting ('billboards blaze/ the end of days'). She takes up the Etruscan dead and the soon-to-be-living ('my one wish kicked/ and stitched herself into the world'), and she does so in lines that are musical and moving and often quite funny. She makes a magnificent debut. Upon finishing the book, readers will demand (like Goethe on his deathbed), 'More Light!' "
— Cody Walker. . . read more [19]
Order your copy now! [20]
** NEW from Able Muse Press [6]: New collection from Barbara Ellen Sorensen - Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes [22] ***I'm pleased to announce that Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes [22], the first full-length collection from Barbara Ellen Sorensen has been released by Able Muse Press [6] and is immediately available worldwide through Amazon [23], Barnes & Nobles [23] and most popular distribution and retail channels here [22] (ISBN 978-1-927409-23-7). Or, just go to Barbara's website, www.barbaraellensorensen.com [24], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [6]. Besides the traditional print edition, an Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and a Barnes & Nobles NOOK digital editions are also available now. An Apple iTunes/iBooks digital edition should also be available within days.
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Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes [22] - Poems by Barbara Ellen Sorensen
(with a Foreword by Veronica Patterson):
Praised in blurbs from Matthew Cooperman, and Suzanne Paola--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.
"These 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’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 Cooperman. . . read more [22]
Order your copy now! [23]
Now Available from Able Muse Press [4]
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Now available from Able Muse Press [4], Amazon and other online & offline bookstores:
• Able Muse - Print Edition back issues & subscription [2]
• T [25]he Able Muse Anthology [25] - the best of the poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography [25]
• Virtue, Big as Sin - poems by Frank Osen [26] (winner - 2012 Able Muse Book Award)
• The Dark Gnu and Other Poems by Wendy Videlock [27]
• Strange Borderlands - poems by Ben Berman [28]
• Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter - poems by Maryann Corbett [29]
• Sailing to Babylon - poems by James Pollock [30] (Finalist, 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize)
• Grasshopper - the poetry of M.A. Griffiths [31]
• Nevertheless - poems by Wendy Videlock [32] (Finalist, 2011 Colorado Book Award)
• Life in the Second Circle - poems by Michael Cantor [33] (Finalist, 2012 Massachusetts Book Award)
• Dirge for an Imaginary World - poems by Matthew Buckley Smith [31] (winner - 2011 Able Muse Book Award)
• Corporeality - stories by Hollis Seamon [35]
Go to www.ablemusepress.com [6] for more titles from Able Muse Press [6]
The new issue of Able Muse [36]: Winter 2013
The new issue of Able Muse, Print Editon (Number 16) - Winter 2013, has just been released, with order/subscription information (for print [37] & Kindle, NOOK, Kobo & iBooks [37] editions), with online excerpts and the subscribers' online edition at: www.AbleMuse.com
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with Able Muse WRITE PRIZE for Poetry & Fiction —
Includes the 2013 winning story & poems from contest winners and finalists.
With the winner and runner-up sonnets from the 2013 Able Muse / Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-Off.
editorial: Alexander Pepple • featured artist: Peter Svensson • featured poet: Jehanne Dubrow (interviewed by Anna M. Evans) • fiction: Cheryl Diane Kidder, Charles Wilkinson, Blaine Vitallo, Donna Laemmlen • essays: A.E. Stallings, Peter Byrne, Philip Morre, David Mason, Chrissy Mason • book reviews: Rory Waterman, Jane Hammons • poetry: Rachel Hadas, R.S. Gwynn, Catharine Savage Brosman, John Savoie, D.R. Goodman, Jeanne Wagner, Richard Wakefield, Melissa Balmain, Tara Tatum, Anna M. Evans, Matthew Buckley Smith, Stephen Harvey, Elise Hempel, Marly Youmans, Amanda Luecking Frost, Rachael Briggs, Chris Childers, James Matthew Wilson, Alex Greenberg, Catullus, Sappho, Theocritus.
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With special thanks for an outstanding new issue to -- Peter Austin, Reagan Upshaw (Assistant Poetry Editor), Gregory Dowling (Nonfiction Editor), Nina Schuyler (Fiction Editor), Keith J. Powell, Janice D. Soderling, John Riley, Rob Wright (Assistant Fiction Editors).Alex Pepple, Editor
www.AbleMuse.com [39]
All applicable links are at the Able Muse homepage - www.ablemuse.com [36]
Or, at the Able Muse Press website - www.ablemusepress.com [6]Cheers,
...Alex
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[6] http://www.ablemusepress.com/
[7] http://www.ablemusepress.com/melissa-balmain-walking-in-on-people-poems
[8] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1927409292/applauzonline-20/ref=nosim
[9] http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/walking-in-on-people-melissa-balmain/1118849707
[10] http://www.melissabalmain.com/
[11] http://www.ablemusepress.com/melissa-balmain-walking-in-on-people-poems#book_order_info
[12] http://www.ablemusepress.com/ellen-kaufman-house-music-poems
[13] http://www.ablemusepress.com/ellen-kaufman-house-music-poems#book_order_info
[14] http://www.ellenkaufman.com/
[15] http://www.ablemusepress.com/stephen-scaer-pumpkin-chucking-poems
[16] http://www.ablemusepress.com/april-lindner-this-bed-our-bodies-shaped-poems
[17] http://www.ablemusepress.com/stephen-scaer-pumpkin-chucking-poems#book_order_info
[18] http://www.stephenscaer.com/
[19] http://www.ablemusepress.com/carol-light-heaven-from-steam-poems
[20] http://www.ablemusepress.com/carol-light-heaven-from-steam-poems#book_order_info
[21] http://www.carol-light.com/
[22] http://www.ablemusepress.com/barabara-ellen-sorensen-compositions-of-the-dead-playing-flutes-poems
[23] http://www.ablemusepress.com/barabara-ellen-sorensen-compositions-of-the-dead-playing-flutes-poems#book_order_info
[24] http://www.barbaraellensorensen.com/
[25] http://www.ablemusepress.com/anthology
[26] http://www.ablemusepress.com/frank-osen-virtue-big-as-sin
[27] http://www.ablemusepress.com/wendy-videlock-dark-gnu-poems
[28] http://www.ablemusepress.com/ben-berman-strange-borderlands-poems
[29] http://www.ablemusepress.com/maryann-corbett-credo-for-the-checkout-line-in-winter-poems
[30] http://www.ablemusepress.com/james-pollock-sailing-to-babylon-poems
[31] http://www.ablemusepress.com/ma-griffiths-grasshopper
[32] http://www.ablemusepress.com/wendy-videlock-nevertheless
[33] http://www.ablemusepress.com/michael-cantor-life-second-circle
[34] http://www.ablemusepress.com/matthew-buckley-smith-dirge-for-imaginary-world
[35] http://www.ablemusepress.com/hollis-seamon-corporeality-stories
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