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Author: Carrie Shipers
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409608
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
Carrie Shipers’s Cause for Concern traverses a landscape of assorted disasters—such as overwork and layoffs, the ill-fated explorer, circus mishaps, nuclear disaster and radiation—but at its heart is the personal disaster of spousal illness. While a spouse might avow faith in the sentiment of love in sickness and in health, the practice of such faith might come undone when faced with the reality of the ravages of illness on the stricken body of the beloved, alongside the caregiving mate who “could love/ [her] husband but distrust his body,/ expect betrayal at every turn.” Full of incisive meditations on frailties and fortitude often delivered with visceral honesty, Cause for Concern is spellbinding from start to finish and, deservedly, the winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award for Poetry. PRAISE FOR CAUSE FOR CONCERN: Carrie Shipers’s magnificent endeavor aims to control the uncontrollable. In her splendid collection Cause for Concern she gives us her spirited poems—subversively satisfying in our era of cool wordplay. Both her comfort with ambiguity and her sassy candor aid the poet as she writes of a wife who is hoodwinked into a necessary patience—one she both chafes from and rebels against after her husband falls seriously ill. In rhythms that alternate between hope and defeat, the poems track the illness, but also punctuate the couple’s changed world with quirky observations and a scrappy spirituality. (Not to mention a canine companion.) Her poet’s craft, palpable in every arresting line, makes the subtlest turns of vulnerability with enviable poise. —Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Only a poet of unquestionable bravery and technical acuity could rehearse the quotidian details of a middle class, middle aged existence with such exquisite, irresistible and terrifying honesty. —Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems If illness is a country inhospitable to guests, then Carrie Shipers’s second poetry collection, Cause for Concern, is our guidebook, preparing us for what we will find in the waiting room, by the bedside, in the bathroom, or on the skin when the gauze is lifted. These are naked, open poems. They say things that make us wince, as when we look at an incision still puckered and red. Shipers reminds us that our lives must first be prodded and cauterized, if the injured parts are ever to heal. —Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Arranged Marriage
Author: Carrie Shipers
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409608
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 106
Get Book Here
Book Description
Carrie Shipers’s Cause for Concern traverses a landscape of assorted disasters—such as overwork and layoffs, the ill-fated explorer, circus mishaps, nuclear disaster and radiation—but at its heart is the personal disaster of spousal illness. While a spouse might avow faith in the sentiment of love in sickness and in health, the practice of such faith might come undone when faced with the reality of the ravages of illness on the stricken body of the beloved, alongside the caregiving mate who “could love/ [her] husband but distrust his body,/ expect betrayal at every turn.” Full of incisive meditations on frailties and fortitude often delivered with visceral honesty, Cause for Concern is spellbinding from start to finish and, deservedly, the winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award for Poetry. PRAISE FOR CAUSE FOR CONCERN: Carrie Shipers’s magnificent endeavor aims to control the uncontrollable. In her splendid collection Cause for Concern she gives us her spirited poems—subversively satisfying in our era of cool wordplay. Both her comfort with ambiguity and her sassy candor aid the poet as she writes of a wife who is hoodwinked into a necessary patience—one she both chafes from and rebels against after her husband falls seriously ill. In rhythms that alternate between hope and defeat, the poems track the illness, but also punctuate the couple’s changed world with quirky observations and a scrappy spirituality. (Not to mention a canine companion.) Her poet’s craft, palpable in every arresting line, makes the subtlest turns of vulnerability with enviable poise. —Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Only a poet of unquestionable bravery and technical acuity could rehearse the quotidian details of a middle class, middle aged existence with such exquisite, irresistible and terrifying honesty. —Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems If illness is a country inhospitable to guests, then Carrie Shipers’s second poetry collection, Cause for Concern, is our guidebook, preparing us for what we will find in the waiting room, by the bedside, in the bathroom, or on the skin when the gauze is lifted. These are naked, open poems. They say things that make us wince, as when we look at an incision still puckered and red. Shipers reminds us that our lives must first be prodded and cauterized, if the injured parts are ever to heal. —Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Arranged Marriage
Author: Amy Glynn
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773491415
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Amy Glynn's Romance Language is a wellspring of culture, nature, natural phenomena, myths, esoterica. A kaleidoscope of sciences and disciplines—spanning archeology, acoustics, botany, zoology, psychology, cosmology, meteorology, mythology—are freely juxtaposed with the bliss of romance gained to longing for the one lost, the celebration of nature and the teeming creatures therein to hope for their enduring sustenance. A logophilic showcase and worthy winner of the 2022 Able Muse Book Award, Romance Language transports the reader into a sensory and cerebral world of the real and imagined, ever reaching for stimulus, wisdom, understanding, and enlightenment. PRAISE FOR ROMANCE LANGUAGE Romance Language thrills to the natural world in all its boggling multiplicity, while reserving a barrage of tart ironies for the fallen humans who inhabit it—the lovers who fail us and those, long gone, we can never let go of. Glynn understands that science is no check to mystery, that we subsist in “an ocean of cadence” that was here before us: “The beginning was music. There was music first.” Her songs channel that original music “of tide, chaos, and rhythm” with such fierceness and sorrow that we are compelled to listen. Their effect is revelatory. —David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven and Late Romance: Anthony Hecht The poems in Romance Language consistently, and seemingly without effort, manage a remarkable feat: they’re unfailingly attentive to the situational subtext that underlies each foray, whether into nature, art, or mythology. With their rueful irony and wit, their candor and self-awareness, these poems are not only technically flawless but also insistently, and sometimes tetchily, human. —Rachel Hadas, 2022 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of Love and Dread Amy Glynn has built upon her naturalist’s precision, her musician’s ear, and her talent for unexpected but apt metaphor, with a heightened attention to what we learn in love. Romance Language is as much about language, though, as it is about romance. Glynn is a dazzling word-hoarder and -shaper. With serious wit, she entwines autobiography with the life of other creatures (most beautifully, birds) and knows our own scale in the landscape and seascape. For all her artifice, her plainest truths are the most moving, as when she hopes for a “gift // for seeing as a gift whatever happens / to us.” These poems “happen” to the reader as a great gift, too. —Mary Jo Salter, author of Zoom Rooms and The Surveyors Glynn brings a polymathic sensibility to her writing, conversant in both high and vernacular diction on subjects ranging widely from science and classical literature to current politics and pop culture. The poems—bold, vibrant, mercurial, mysterious, sometimes wickedly funny, and always highly musical—remind me that form is a living, breathing part of our contemporary canon. Whether fixed like the sonnet or ghazal, or nonce, or free verse—these poems are constructed with great passion and precision, and the result is a luminous, powerful, and utterly original outpouring. —Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive and Only ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Amy Glynn is a poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry. She is the author of A Modern Herbal (Measure Press, 2013). She has received the Troubadour Prize, The SPUR Award of the Academy of Western Writers, Poetry Northwest’s Carolyn Kizer Award, and two James Merrill House fellowships, among other honors. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Author: Len Krisak
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490915
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 59
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Book Description
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 WILL With 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. —Greg Williamson, author of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck In 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. 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. Say What You Will is a smart and kindly book. —Brad Leithauser, 2020 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of Rhyme's Rooms Readers 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. —A. M. Juster, author of Wonder and Wrath ABOUT 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.
Author: Alexander Pepple
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409640
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2015 issue, Number 20. 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). ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." – Dana Gioia. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2015 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION — Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL — Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST — Léon Leijdekkers. FEATURED POET — Amit Majmudar; (Interviewed by Daniel Brown). FICTION — Paul Soto, Lynda Sexson, Andrea Witzke Slot. ESSAYS — N.S. Thompson, Moira Egan. BOOK REVIEWS — Stephen Kampa, Robert B. Shaw. POETRY — X.J. Kennedy, Wendy Videlock, Kim Bridgford, Peter Kline, Catharine Savage Brosman, Terese Coe, Steven Winn, Jay Udall, Beth Houston, Jennifer Reeser, Leslie Schultz, Ryan Wilson, Max Gutmann, Freeman Rogers, Dan Campion, Brooke Clark, David Stephenson, Autumn Newman, James Matthew Wilson, Athar C. Pavis, Jeanne Wagner, Elise Hempel.
Author: Alexander Pepple
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409810
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2016 issue, Number 22. 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 Museprint 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). ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2016 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Mitch Dobrowner; (Interviewed by Sharon Passmore). FEATURED POET - Bill Coyle; (Interviewed by Ernest Hilbert). FICTION - Erika Warmbrunn, Cameron MacKenzie, Vicky Mlyniec. ESSAYS - Gerry Cambridge. BOOK REVIEWS - Amit Majmudar, Brooke Clark. POETRY - Amit Majmudar, Len Krisak, Scott Ruescher, Timothy Murphy, Cody Walker, Christine de Pizan, Håkan Sandell, Anna M. Evans, Feng Zhi, Tony Barnstone, Liz Ahl, Susan McLean, Elise Hempel, Siham Karami, Maryann Corbett, Fran Markover, Colleen Carias, Julie Steiner, Elizabeth Wager, Clare Jones.
Author: Alexander Pepple
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490486
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2019 issue, Number 27. 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 tribute to Timothy Murphy special feature and the winning stories and poems from the 2019 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 2019 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION – Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists EDITORIAL – Alexander Pepple GUEST EDITORIAL – Richard Wakefield FEATURED ART – A Hunt Theme TRIBUTE TO TIMOTHY MURPHY FEATURE: --Tribute GUEST-EDITOR: Richard Wakefield --Tribute Poetry: A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Rhina P. Espaillat, John Ridland, Amit Majmudar, Wendy Videlock, Bruce Bennett, Len Krisak, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Mary Meriam, Andrew Frisardi, Richard Meyer, John Beaton --Tribute Essay: Dana Gioia FICTION – Erin Russell ESSAYS – Edward Lee, Tony Whedon BOOK REVIEWS – Brooke Clark, Travis Biddick POETRY – Hailey Leithauser, John Philip Drury, Len Krisak, James Matthew Wilson, Suzanne Noguere, Alfred Nicol, Katie Hartsock, David MacRae Landon, Amy Bagan, Barry Abrams, Miriam O'Neal, Beth Paulson, Daniel Galef
Author: Stephen Gibson
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490931
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76
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Book Description
Reimagining the iconic Mexican artist's life and relationships, Stephen Gibson's Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale explores Kahlo's passions and pains through vivid persona poems. Realized entirely in a modified triolet form, the collection is essentially an ekphrastic epic inspired by the paintings, photos, and personal effects on display in a 2015 Fort Lauderdale exhibition. Gibson probes the artist’s inner world, giving voice to Kahlo's desires, anguish, and defiant spirit. He conjures her crippling injuries from a bus accident, her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera, and her affairs with Leon Trotsky and others, all filtered through her fervent art. This innovative collection brings Frida Kahlo’s singular vision to life in visceral contemporary verse. PRAISE FOR FRIDA KAHLO IN FORT LAUDERDALE: In this book of incantations Stephen Gibson says, “What one loathes and desires can be the same thing,” and those two strands weave through these poems like a double helix of beauty and repulsion. The trolley accident that impaled Kahlo comes up over and over, and each time there is a new layer added to the story in much the same way a painter adds layers to a portrait. These are poems, but they are also music and paintings that give the lucky reader a luminous vision of this woman who forged a life of beauty out of the wreck of her pain. — Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale is composed entirely of triolets about the artist and her paintings. The overall effect is akin to pointillism: the collection’s fifty-seven triolets blend in the reader’s consciousness much as the tiny dots of various colors in a pointillist painting blend in a viewer’s eye to form a coherent image. In this case, the image is of Frida Kahlo, the renowned Mexican painter known for her many portraits and self-portraits. Gibson—brilliant as always in his mastery of formal poetic structures—has crafted a portrait of Kahlo that reads as a single long poem, and yet resonates in the mind as something painterly, a shimmering, vibrant portrait of an artist. — Edward Falco, author of Wolf Moon Blood Moon These punchy little poems rat-a-tat the reader like a boxer’s jab-cross-uppercut. The immediate subject is Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s bughouse marriage, but this is really a book for everyone. Even the happiest of married couples will react with some version of been there, done that. Divorce lawyers will get dollar signs in their eyes. Young singles will find Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale a useful road map through the minefield of conjugal bliss. Mainly, though, these poems are for poetry lovers. They’re smart, they’re funny, and they sting like hell—they sting you in a way that makes you say, sting me again. — David Kirby, author of Help Me, Information ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Gibson’s seventh poetry collection Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror won the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Billy Collins. Earlier collections have won the Donald Justice Prize, Idaho Prize for Poetry, and the MARGIE Book Prize. His poems have appeared in such journals as Able Muse, American Arts Quarterly, the American Journal of Poetry, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Court Green, the Evansville Review, EPOCH, Field, the Gettysburg Review, the Hudson Review, the Iowa Review, J Journal, Measure, New England Review, Notre Dame Review, the Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, Raleigh Review, Salamander, the Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, the Southern Review, Southwest Review, Upstreet, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Author: Janis Harrington
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490958
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96
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Book Description
Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is a testament to resiliency in the throes of mounting family tragedies and trials “beyond human comprehension.” This odyssey from loss toward recovery and hope celebrates the boundless love and support between siblings. Using an adapted sonnet form, Harrington has wrought a taut and spellbinding tale in this finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR HOW TO CUT A WOMAN IN HALF: In this stunning sequence of sonnets—a sequence that reads like a novel, in which each sonnet is so masterfully crafted that its form disappears into the story it tells—Janis Harrington spins a larger narrative of intergenerational family tragedy, but also of sisterly devotion and resilience. The whole sweep of it is so compelling that once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. How to Cut a Woman in Half takes the reader through shock and grief and then, very subtly and tenderly, back from the edge of an abyss. —Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem and Earth These deft narrative sonnets beautifully contain painful restraint and the breaking of sorrow; the slant and partial rhymes refuse to meet expectations for grieving an intentional death: “We look at each other, still / as the motionless hands on the clock’s face, / marooned in this spotless, silent house, / nothing on the horizon to save us.” The sisters save each other, learning to appreciate “the ordinary miracle of dawn.” —April Ossmann, author of Anxious Music and Event Boundaries These carefully wrought sonnets take readers on a journey “to grief’s center” as the speaker supports her sister through new widowhood and, in the process, rediscovers and explores her own submerged grief. Many poems take place in the liminal space between “living and not,” bardo moments that contain “all my life’s partings.” It is striking how fully present the speaker is in the experience of mourning, and how well suited the sonnet form is for containing such deeply personal wells of human sorrow. A beautiful and healing read. —Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive and Only ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including: Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, North Carolina Literary Review, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. She was the runner-up for the White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2020 and a finalist for the 2021 James Applewhite Poetry Prize and the 2022 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. After living in Switzerland for many years, she and her husband returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. How to Cut a Woman in Half was a finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award.
Author: Richard Wakefield
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490699
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Book Description
Richard Wakefield’s third collection of poetry, Terminal Park, bears truthful and often wryly humorous witness to a wide range of human experience. His portraits of life in rural Washington State are particularly compelling, in a way that evokes the best of Frost without sacrificing Wakefield's own distinctive voice. A showcase of given and nonce forms, Terminal Park is the work of a master craftsman, delivered with wit, empathy, and grace. PRAISE FOR TERMINAL PARK Richard Wakefield's Terminal Park is a triumph from a master of formal poetry with a bit of a Zen streak. Alternately wistful, wry, and joyous, Wakefield takes on a wide range of subjects without anger or rhetoric. My favorites were the many elegiac landscape poems, which reminded me of the some of the best poems of Robert Frost. —A.M. Juster, author of Wonder and Wrath This new volume reveals a poet whose mastery of form will amaze readers. Richard Wakefield lives deeply in his world, past and present, touching and feeling everything that surrounds him, alert to every texture, “the grain of wood, the grit of sand.” He scans memory, repossessing luminous and sometimes uncanny moments from his past. A poem is, of course, a system of linked sounds, and Wakefield’s ear never misses the chance for a linking echo. In fact, I love the internal and external rhyming here, done without flash, with a kind of holy decorum. The seasons course through these poems, in literal and figurative flight, but the poet asserts with good reason that “an old man at his kitchen window sees / by winter light.” And it’s the clarity of winter light that makes these poems shimmer. I will return to the pages of Terminal Park again to revel in their wisdom and grace notes. —Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 Terminal Park ranges widely and dives deep. The book’s opening lines, where bleak subject matter is conveyed by lilting verse, tell us a lot about what will follow: “‘Terminal Park’ reads the vine-covered sign / where junkies and drunks reach the end of the line.” The poet’s mastery is evident throughout, whether depicting desolate rural vignettes, or vividly rendered moments of Biblical, literary, or personal history. Though many poems seem haunted by entropy, decay, suffering, and loss—“The Work of Darkness”—they are leavened by stoicism and humor. Beautifully organized and reflecting a lifetime’s hard-won wisdom, the collection as a whole is not merely enjoyable. It is exhilarating. —Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Richard Wakefield earned his PhD in American literature from the University of Washington and has taught college humanities for forty-two years, thirty-five of them at Tacoma Community College. For over twenty-five years he reviewed poetry, fiction, and literary biography for the Seattle Times. His first book, Robert Frost and the Opposing Lights of the Hour (Peter Lang Publishing), was a study of Frost’s poetry in the context of his life and times. His first collection of poems, East of Early Winters (University of Evansville Press), won the Richard Wilbur Award. His second collection, A Vertical Mile (Able Muse Press), was short-listed for the Poet’s Prize. His poem “Petrarch” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. He and his wife, Catherine, have been married forty-eight years and have two daughters, two sons-in-law, and two grandchildren.
Author: Rob Wright
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490710
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 86
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Book Description
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, São 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 WISHES Rob 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 Poems One 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 Out The 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 Shiraz
