Able Muse/Eratosphere Newsletter - Summer 2018: Just Released - Able Muse, print edition, No. 25, Summer 2018 & Latest Books

[13] 
"Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s welcoming voice, receptive heart, artistic mastery, and empathic vision become an alchemy of being." —Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

"Heart-thawingly honest, deliriously sexy, and compassionate down to the fingertips. A book of kindness and bewilderment and delight from one of our best poets." —Teddy Macker, author of This World

"It is a delight to find a poet who can tell a crackling story laced with gorgeous imagery and euphony that will appeal to the ancient seats of learning: the heart, belly, and brain." —David Lee, Utah State Poet Laureate emeritus, author of Last Call and A Legacy of Shadows

"The elegance of her simplicity will blind you to her mastery. Then, she will let you fall, head over heels, in Love. With everything." —Wayne Muller (from the foreword), author of Sabbath and Legacy of the Heart

[15] 
[Anna M. Evans] series on the Titanic is one of the most memorable I have ever read. The technical difficulty of the poem is noteworthy, but it is the construction of the book, based on that poem as a centerpiece, that is genius.
—Kim Bridgford, author of Undone

Anna M. Evans, [dives] into the wreck of the Titanic to illuminate both personal experience and the politics of social class ... The result is one of the best, most unforgettable books I have read in years. —Julie Kane, author of Paper Bullets

Despite the great accomplishment of [Evans’s] technical tours de force, it is not admiration for technique that is the main feeling that stays with a reader once the book is finished, rather it is the undeniably powerful emotional force of what is being said. —Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of  Love in Another Language

[17] 
[L]ike the cynics in their classical conception, the poet’s subtext here is hope, at least love, and living without illusion in the extremis of the quotidian.
—Dan O’Brien, author of War Reporter

Like his stories—approachable, insightful, and touched with a tinge of sadness for what was and, indeed, is—Appel’s poems speak in straightforward, plain language to raise the curtain on the intimacies of his world. —Alice Friman, author of The View from Saturn

Quirky characters, often full of longing and regret, pepper Appel’s work ... These characters seem to fail to leave a mark on the world, beyond the poet’s eye.
—Brigit Young (from the foreword), author of Worth a Thousand Words

Both beautifully written and lively, the poems in The Cynic in Extremis embrace the world with warmth and wit. —John Skoyles, author of Suddenly It’s Evening and poetry editor at Ploughshares

[19] 
Aaron Poochigian takes on the role of American flâneur for the twenty-first century, drifting through the frenetic metropolis at a dreamer’s planetary pace.
   — A. E. Stallings, 2016 Able Muse Book Award judge

Each poem is a tower growing out of our human filth and scraping the sky with sky-lines, and together they build a city of words. Put New York in your pocket. It’s inside this book.
   — Tony Barnstone

These poems travel at a fast clip, pulling you along through cityscapes, wastelands, and other vistas. Some of the poems tunnel downward, plumbing depths of mood and memory.
   — Rachel Hadas

The concluding lines of “Song: Go and Do It” . . . claim, “I’ll still swear/ we could be happy anywhere.” One sure location of that “anywhere” exists between the covers of Manhattanite.
   — R. S. Gwynn

[21] 
New Jersey Noir is a loving tribute to the Garden State by a writer who appreciates its grime as much as its glory.
   — Hollis Seamon (Jersey girl, born and raised), author of Somebody Up There Hates You

In prose as fast-moving as a bullet, Baer compels the reader to keep flipping pages more and more rapidly. Baer’s writing is taut and gut-wrenching. New Jersey Noir and Baer’s talent presage a brilliant career for this wonderfully gifted writer.
   — Terri Brown-Davidson, author of Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight

Jack Colt, the private investigator in William Baer’s New Jersey Noir, romances the genre to the suspenseful effect that JJ “Jake” Gittes achieves in Roman Polanski’s acclaimed Chinatown. In place of technicolor LA, however, Baer evokes a cinematic chiaroscuro New Jersey, specifically Paterson, its history and politics limned over a baseline of Springsteen, doo-wop, and Whitney Houston.
   — Dennis Must, author of Hush Now, Don’t Explain