Able Muse 2013 Contests & New Books: Write Prize (poetry & fiction), Book Award (poetry manuscript)

 

 

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** COMING SOON from ABLE MUSE PRESS [12] --(January, 2013) and now available for Pre-Order ***

I'm pleased to announce that Hollis Seamon's third book, Corporeality [13], a story collection from Able Muse Press [12] (January 31, 2013), is now available for pre-order worldwide through Amazon [14], Barnes & Nobles [14] and most popular distribution and retail channels here  [14](ISBN 978-1-927409-03-9). Or, just go to Hollis's website, www.hollisseamon.com [15], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [12]. Besides the traditional print edition, digital reader editions for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Nobles NOOK, Kobo reader and Apple iTunes/iBooks are also forthcoming.

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Corporeality [13] - stories by Hollis Seamon

Praised in blurbs by Alan Davis, Dave King, Edward Schwarzschild, Eugenia Kim, Nalini Jones

In Corporeality, Hollis Seamon’s latest fiction collection, we meet the cat lady, the professor dealing with a plagiarist while coping with personal hardships, sibling rivalry of the unnaturally cursed kind, the dog that goes beyond everyday dog sense and scent to protect its owners. These are some of the eclectic characters and settings that make Corporeality irresistible and difficult to put down once you’ve started reading. Like her preceding collection Body Work and mystery novel Flesh, this book is a testament to Seamon’s ample gifts as a storyteller..

"Hollis Seamon’s Corporeality is a wonderful collection of stories, dazzling and unsentimental, full of everyday tragedies, fairy-tale motifs, and rambunctious, life-affirming characters who stand up to bullies and to fate, whether in a hospice, a flophouse, or a university classroom. It’s a feast of language that you won’t soon forget."
                                —Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative and Alone with the Owl

"These stories have grace, wit, adventure, danger, humor, compassion, magic, and rage. Hollis Seamon casts full and dazzling light on those who are often overlooked—teenaged lovebirds in hospice, flood victims before the flood, plagiarists, arsonists, old ladies, fat dogs. She brings them to life so tenderly and powerfully that they stay with you, long after the last page."
                                —Nalini Jones, author of What You Call Winter

. . . read more [13]

Pre-Order your copy now! [14]

 

 

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** COMING SOON from ABLE MUSE PRESS [12] --(January, 2013) and now available for Pre-Order ***

Strange Borderlands [16], Ben Berman's full-length debut collection of poetry from  Able Muse Press [12] (January 31, 2013) and is now available for pre-order worldwide through Amazon [17], Barnes & Nobles [17] and most popular distribution and retail channels here  [17](ISBN 978-1-927409-05-3). Or, just go to Ben's website, www.ben-berman.com [18], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [12]. Besides the traditional print edition, digital reader editions for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Nobles NOOK, Kobo reader and Apple iTunes/iBooks are also forthcoming. 

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Strange Borderlands [16] - poems by Ben Berman
(with a Foreword by Fred Marchant): 
Praised in blurbs from Alan Shapiro, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Gregory Djanikian--

Strange Borderlands, Ben Berman’s first full-length collection, counterpoises insights with uncertainties while chronicling the poet's immersion in a new culture. In compelling metrical, free verse and prose poems, Berman provides a vivid narrative of exotic adventures, especially his Peace Corps service in Zimbabwe—the people, the land, and his “struggling with the blurred lines of where things end” on his return home. This distinctive collection can go from humorous to heartbreaking, and is spellbinding from start to finish—a rare achievement.

"These are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism, a word so overused it is often flattened out to a platitude or piety. But not in this book." 
– Fred Marchant (from the Foreword)

Ben Berman’s lyric poems set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life:  the hammer striking the sheep’s head, the sustenance that follows; disciplinary beatings that students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade.  Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty. I believe every word in this collection. This is an unforgettable debut by a powerful and humble voice.
                        —Dzvinia Orlowsky

. . . read more [16]

Order your copy now! [17]

 

 

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** LATEST NEWS: Congratulations to James Pollock - Sailing to Babylon [19] from  Able Muse Press [12] is one of only five books shortlisted for Governor General's Literary Awards [20]***

Sailing to Babylon [19], the first full-length collection from James Pollock has been released by Able Muse Press [12] and is immediately available worldwide through Amazon [21], Barnes & Nobles [21] and most popular distribution and retail channels here  [21](ISBN 978-0-9865338-7-7). Or, just go to James's website, www.james-pollock.com [22], or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com [12]. Besides the traditional print edition, an Amazon Kindle and a Barnes & Nobles NOOK digital editions are also available now. An Apple iTunes/iBooks digital edition should also be available soon. 

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Sailing to Babylon [19] - poems by James Pollock
(with a Foreword by Jeffery Donaldson): 
Blurbs from Edward Hirsch and Sven Birkerts--

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.”

"You 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)

. . . read more [19]

Order your copy now! [21]

 

 

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The current issue of Able Muse [23], print edition (#13, Summer 2012) -- 190 pages of poetry & fiction including last year's Write Prize Honorable Mentions, plus the essays, reviews and art & photography.

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Order [25] the current, Summer 2012 issue, and/or subscribe [26] at www.ablemusepress.com [12] .

 

Cheers,
...Alex