The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF Author: Emily Leithauser
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409683
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser transforms keenly felt experience and bittersweet memories into poems of impressive craftsmanship. She deftly muses on the dichotomies of, among other things, childhood and growing up, the headiness of love gained and the pangs of love lost, the joys of the nuclear family and the trials when it gets broken up. Although a first book, The Borrowed World is the seasoned work of poet of abundant talent coming into her powers and deservedly, the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR THE BORROWED WORLD: In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser’s formal mastery—her consummate knack for writing lines and sentences as crisp and elegant as the Edo prints to which she pays homage—entwines with the sheer immediacy and vulnerability of the poet’s voice. Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major talent. —Peter Campion, 2015 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of El Dorado Emily Leithauser’s first collection, The Borrowed World, is an elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss, familial relations—with all the devastating implosions within—and our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning debut. —Natasha Trethewey, 2012–2014 US Poet Laureate, author of Thrall If her intensely accurate perceptions of the physical world and the beautiful forms in which she sets those perceptions were all that Emily Leithauser gave us in these poems, they would be more than enough to satisfy the hungriest poetry reader. But step by perspicuous step, in poem after poem, she enlarges and encompasses, she broadens and deepens and transmutes perception into feeling, feeling into thought, and thought into revelation. —Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of 3 Sections Love poems, family poems, narrative poems: The Borrowed World is a moving and memorable debut which covers a lot of ground but is always rooted in actualities. The poems are very well-made, too, but their equally great distinction is to be well-felt—subtle in their account of the observing “I,” and simultaneously generous and shrewd in their understanding of others. Page by page, they create a series of powerful cameos; taken as a whole, their larger purpose emerges: to register what can be known and (especially) not known about our lives as individuals, and to value what time allows us to enjoy on earth, while admitting the brevity of our stay here. —Andrew Motion, 1999–2009 UK Poet Laureate, author of The Customs House I have read The Borrowed World several times, and each time I find more in it to be delighted and touched by. Emily Leithauser’s art waits for you, and I am sure that you will be as pleased and moved by it as I have been. —Michael Palma (from the foreword), author of Begin in Gladness

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF Author: Emily Leithauser
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409683
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser transforms keenly felt experience and bittersweet memories into poems of impressive craftsmanship. She deftly muses on the dichotomies of, among other things, childhood and growing up, the headiness of love gained and the pangs of love lost, the joys of the nuclear family and the trials when it gets broken up. Although a first book, The Borrowed World is the seasoned work of poet of abundant talent coming into her powers and deservedly, the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR THE BORROWED WORLD: In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser’s formal mastery—her consummate knack for writing lines and sentences as crisp and elegant as the Edo prints to which she pays homage—entwines with the sheer immediacy and vulnerability of the poet’s voice. Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major talent. —Peter Campion, 2015 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of El Dorado Emily Leithauser’s first collection, The Borrowed World, is an elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss, familial relations—with all the devastating implosions within—and our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning debut. —Natasha Trethewey, 2012–2014 US Poet Laureate, author of Thrall If her intensely accurate perceptions of the physical world and the beautiful forms in which she sets those perceptions were all that Emily Leithauser gave us in these poems, they would be more than enough to satisfy the hungriest poetry reader. But step by perspicuous step, in poem after poem, she enlarges and encompasses, she broadens and deepens and transmutes perception into feeling, feeling into thought, and thought into revelation. —Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of 3 Sections Love poems, family poems, narrative poems: The Borrowed World is a moving and memorable debut which covers a lot of ground but is always rooted in actualities. The poems are very well-made, too, but their equally great distinction is to be well-felt—subtle in their account of the observing “I,” and simultaneously generous and shrewd in their understanding of others. Page by page, they create a series of powerful cameos; taken as a whole, their larger purpose emerges: to register what can be known and (especially) not known about our lives as individuals, and to value what time allows us to enjoy on earth, while admitting the brevity of our stay here. —Andrew Motion, 1999–2009 UK Poet Laureate, author of The Customs House I have read The Borrowed World several times, and each time I find more in it to be delighted and touched by. Emily Leithauser’s art waits for you, and I am sure that you will be as pleased and moved by it as I have been. —Michael Palma (from the foreword), author of Begin in Gladness

Trap Street (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Trap Street (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF Author: Will Cordeiro
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490583
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Will Cordeiro's Trap Street travels a shifting landscape. Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations. Cordeiro's vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer. This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things. PRAISE FOR TRAP STREET The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur. Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream. What's left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this. These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there. I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a book both of witness and warning. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist. Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular. His declaration that "Earth's everything I am" runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding. -David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound "Not everything must have some cosmic meaning." That is the sort of red-wheelbarrow faith Will Cordeiro depends on as his adventurous eye records the variegated appearance of the natural and manmade world, no detail too small to merit commemoration. The scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus cited the "haecceitas" ("this-ness") of observed experience as one component in the quest for the divine, so there is every reason to regard Cordeiro's poems as bridging the gap between life's overlooked detritus and exalted vision itself. And visual acuity here is matched by a strenuous verbality, color-coordinated vowels informing chewable consonants in a lexicon ranging from "cattywampus" to "glumes" to "blear." It's a pied-beauty diction and syntax that remind me of Hopkins and Marianne Moore. We should all join in welcoming Will Cordeiro's amazing debut. -Alfred Corn, author of The Poem's Heartbeat ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Will Cordeiro has work published in Agni, Best New Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Offing, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer's Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. Will received an MFA and PhD from Cornell University. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Currently, Will lives in Flagstaff and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.

The Blind Loon - A Bestiary

The Blind Loon - A Bestiary PDF Author: Ed Shacklee
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409861
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
In his impressive bestiary, The Blind Loon, Ed Shacklee shows as keen an insight into the nature of the beast roaming free as into the beast within. This encyclopedic collection includes the commonplace python, monkey, crocodile, tortoise, camel; the mythical kraken, lamia, chimera, wyvern; the prehistoric ankylosaurus; the fantastical logorrhea, mope, snub, hipster. Shacklee doles out marvels, mischief and hilarity in The Blind Loon, and the breathtaking illustrations of Russ Spitkovsky provide an accompanying visual feast that are by themselves worth the price of admission. A Fog of Blurbs Their plumage is a sheen of words whose meanings are the same- inveigling, too often heard, obnoxious birds, but tame, their mewling call is pecks of praise without one speck of blame. Indifferent if they foul their nests or poop rains on the rabble, garrulously gathered on the garret eaves of Babel, they preen as they pontificate on arts in which they dabble, for truth goes out the window when the Blurbs fly into town; a mist of cloying tidings, thought essential to renown, their beaks grow long and longer and are uniformly brown.

Pearl

Pearl PDF Author: John Ridland
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409896
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Pearl is an intricate fourteenth-century poem written by one of the greatest Middle English poets—the anonymous artist who also gave us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This medieval masterpiece presents the meditative Dream Vision of a father (the Dreamer) mourning the loss of a young daughter (his Pearl). Having recently translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to critical acclaim, John Ridland now tackles the even more challenging Pearl. He succeeds in giving us another innovative and pleasurable translation that retains line-by-line fidelity with the source material, while bringing the fourteenth-century Northwest Midland dialect into an unstrained contemporary idiom. Ridland's inventive meter and rhyme convey the sonic beauty of the original. Moreover, his preface provides a comprehensive background and analysis of Pearl, points out the techniques deployed by the original poet, and explains Ridland's own approach to translating the poem. This translation will delight and reward the reader. PRAISE FOR JOHN RIDLAND’S TRANSLATION OF PEARL: John Ridland’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight made that fourteenth-century chivalric romance not only accessible but alive to our twenty-first century sensibilities. Now his translation Pearl, also by the anonymous Gawain Poet, does the same for that poignant dream vision. The poem’s formal complexities are still here, mutatis mutandis, but they enhance rather than obscure the story of a grieving father’s dream vision of his lost daughter in paradise. Six hundred years vanish, and the reader feels an intimate, profound emotional connection with the universal human experiences of loss, grief, and hope. —Richard Wakefield, author of A Vertical Mile An attractively readable translation, which makes a real attempt to convey the metrical beauty and intricacy of the original. —Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, editors of The Works of the Gawain Poet After reading John Ridland’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight some time ago, I thought, “Well, he’s done it now: doomed himself to never achieving anything as remarkable as this again, because it’s impossible.” But I was wrong: his new translation of Pearl—an even more challenging work by the same anonymous fourteenth-century Gawain Poet—is equally musical and moves with the same charmed pace in the telling that is perfect for what is being told. —Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Her Place in These Designs John Ridland’s translation offers us, in accessible, contemporary English, all the dazzling complexity and beauty of Pearl’s structures, rhythms, and rhymes. —Maryann Corbett, winner, Willis Barnstone Translation Prize; author of Street View

Romance Language (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Romance Language (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF 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.

Cause for Concern (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Cause for Concern (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF 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

Able Muse, Summer 2016 (No. 21 - print edition)

Able Muse, Summer 2016 (No. 21 - print edition) PDF Author: Amanda Jernigan
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409799
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2016 issue, Number 21. 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: EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Andy Biggs. FEATURED POET - Amanda Jernigan; (Interviewed by Ange Mlinko). FICTION - Andrew Valentine, Terri Brown-Davidson, John Christopher Nelson, Timothy Reilly. ESSAYS - Ron McFarland, N.S. Thompson, Barbara Haas. BOOK REVIEWS - Amit Majmudar, John Ellis. POETRY - Midge Goldberg, Jean L. Kreiling, Sankha Ghosh, Timothy Murphy, Pedro Poitevin, Joseph Hutchison, Pierre de Ronsard, Heinrich Heine, Catharine Savage Brosman, Rachel Hadas, Stephen Palos, Bruce Bennett, Doris Watts, Jeanne Emmons.

No Evil Star

No Evil Star PDF Author: Anne Sexton
Publisher: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472063666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight PDF Author: John Ridland
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the anonymous Gawain-Poet (or Pearl-Poet) is, like Beowulf, one of the greatest classics of English literature. Hailed as the finest Arthurian romance, this technically brilliant tale of enchantment, faith, temptation, and chivalry is tautly constructed, with a wonderfully rich vocabulary and vivid language that blends sophisticated atmosphere with psychological depth. John Ridland’s new Modern English translation, unlike most presentations, is complete, covering every passage and word of the Middle English, Northwest Midland dialect original with the same line numbering, contents and meaning. His is the only version written in a familiar modern meter—pleasurable to modern ears, yet retaining the spirit of repetition and alliteration of the medieval original. And Dr. Ridland’s introduction and notes are enlightening. This translation is a must-have for unlocking all the pleasures and delights of the original classic. PRAISE FOR JOHN RIDLAND’S TRANSLATION: With his loving rendition of a great classic into vigorous metrical lines, John Ridland has given Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a fresh lease on life. I’ve seen several other versions of this masterpiece, but none so engagingly readable as Ridland’s. His preface, too, is useful and illuminating. Here is a book to enjoy right now and to cherish forever. —X.J. Kennedy John Ridland gives us a recognizably English Gawain, and a very pleasurable one at that. The language is ours. It is slightly elevated, as befits a work so finely crafted, but only enough to demand our attention. Originally written in the same alliterative verse as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was archaic in its own day; now, over six-hundred years later, alliterative verse can be as inaccessible as the pentatonic harp tunes that apparently accompanied it. Ridland gives the poem a long, loose line that sings in the lyrical passages, creeps in the spooky ones, and cavorts in the comic ones. Just as important, the densely mythic ethos, fully intact, enriches every word. —Richard Wakefield Panoramas of banqueting and hunting, closely observed rituals of dressing, arming, and game preparation, and rich descriptions of landscape and weather—Ridland’s translation presents these in all their delightful, over-the-top particularity. —Maryann Corbett (from the foreword) The language in which the consummate poet and translator John Ridland serves up this delicious story in verse is exactly what it deserves. The descriptions are exuberant, the narrative flows and exhilarates like the wine at the courts we’re asked to imagine, and the exchanges between complex characters so subtly flavored by intelligent diplomacy that it makes the dialogue of much current fiction seem, by contrast, like a six-pack on the front stoop. Read this book. I suspect that, like all enchantments, it shifts and assumes different forms to different eyes. But I do guarantee surprises, and inexhaustible delight. —Rhina P. Espaillat

Manhattanite (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Manhattanite (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF Author: Aaron Poochigian
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1927409934
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
Aaron Poochigian’s prizewinning second collection of poetry, Manhattanite, is by turns frenzied and focused. It examines New York’s juxtaposed symbols of towering achievement and monumental desolation, and then traverses the country to California’s Central Valley, where the poet reclaims his grandparents’ home. Poochigian consistently entertains, whether his theme is lamentation or celebration—a grizzled urban pigeon (scavenging for “the sort of faith/ that holds for here and now and vibes like song”) or an Ohio wind turbine (an “ungatherable/ iron flower” seen “juggling . . . / three arms’ worth/ of gale-force wind”). Manhattanite is, deservedly, the winner of the 2016 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR MANHATTANITE: In Manhattanite, 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. This collection is a celebration of exuberant melancholy, or melancholy exuberance, slick lyric cum urbane pastoral. —A. E. Stallings (from the foreword), 2016 Able Muse Book Award judge Manhattanite gives us the Manhattan of speed chess players in the park, tipsy tipplers tipping off the rooftops, the night sky bright with city light, tenants, tenements and supers. Aaron Poochigian is the poet in New York seeking a holy aura in the song of gunshots and spiral sirens, picking like a grizzled pigeon through stray newspapers, bottles, bags, and candy wrappers for a scrap of religion. 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 Reading Aaron Poochigian’s Manhattanite is a dynamic, kinetic experience. 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. Whichever way they move, Poochigian’s poems perform with such panache and brio that it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. I’d say do both—and keep reading. But be warned: this isn’t a feel-good book. It’s a fearless book. —Rachel Hadas Thoreau once boasted that he had traveled widely in Concord; Aaron Poochigian’s title indicates that he has traveled widely elsewhere—in the one borough worth experiencing, through western deserts, aboard “an ultra-modern train/ lisping through French or German woods,” and in a Paris of naked bulbs and seedy cabarets. In all of these settings, he deftly choreographs his cast of nameless characters. 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