Able Muse/Eratosphere Newsletter - Winter 2016: Just Released - Able Muse, print edition, No. 22, winter 2016 & Contests & more

[Ben Berman's] luminous details evoke a world of mutable forms and shapes that suggest the fragility of our lives. . . . This is a quietly beautiful book that deserves attention and recognition..
—Jeff Friedman

The influence here of Frost returns us to Frost’s virtues: these poems make points and have a point of view. Like Frost, Berman is unsparing in his introspection.
—Rodger Kamenetz

His observations are enriched with various kinds of humor—aphorisms, riddles, word plays, and puns. This book is wise and wonderful..
—Beth Ann Fennelly

Ben Berman’s fine, clever poems are never merely clever. . . . If invention is his inclination, order is his learned yet sly companion, “a partner,” he writes, “the type/ that coyly invites chaos to dance.”
—Lawrence Raab

Has American poetry ever produced a fresher, savvier, grittier, more elegant, and drop-dead formally exhilarating sequence than Katie Hartsock’s “Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays”? If so, I’ve yet to see it. Hartsock is as deft (and loving) with the vulgarities of truck stop rent-by-the-hour as with the secret wit of rhyme, or the venerables of Homeric epic: her range and her inventiveness appear to know no limit. And this is just a fraction of what bursts to life in Bed of Impatiens. I’m dazzled by the sheer bounty of it.
—Linda Gregerson

Like René Magritte I want to paint “This is not a first book” under this first book. It is Lolita all grown up and taking us on a cross-country tour of the motels she stayed in with Humbert. It’s St. Augustine as Dennis Rodman, elbowing us out of position underneath God’s basket. But it’s not a cacophony of surrealism.
—James Cummins

Katie Hartsock’s book of poems Bed of Impatiens is, for a first volume, unusually broad in its range and fierce in its attitudes. . . . . Hartsock is a sharp and clever reader of the books of nature and of art, yet writes in nobody’s shadow.
—Mary Kinzie

The apparently domestic poems in Second Rain (poems about family, gardening, dogs, birds, and a few memorable tigers) deliver enough controlled intensity “to shake the trees all down.
—Rachel Hadas

[Elise Hempel’s] curiosity and insights singled her out as special, but her ability to shape her feelings into words remains what I find most unique.
—Bruce Guernsey (from the foreword)

From the title poem on, Elise Hempel’s Second Rain matches form with feeling, delivering insights that seem at once inevitable and necessary.
—Vince Gotera

. . . each piece in Second Rain each piece in Second Rain “briefly blesses you.”
—Edward Byrne