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

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

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.

Say What You Will (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Say What You Will (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF 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.

Manhattanite

Manhattanite PDF Author: Aaron Poochigian
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781927409923
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
Manhattanite, winner of the 2016 Able Muse Book Award, explores, interrogates, or strives within a New York experience shaded with challenge and menace, or illumed with magnificence. It may quest for "a cosmic cause" or for "faith/ that holds for here and now." And here and there, it bursts into song of celebration, love or lamentation.

Able Muse, Winter 2017 (No. 24 - print edition)

Able Muse, Winter 2017 (No. 24 - print edition) PDF Author: Jacqueline Osherow
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490095
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Able Muse, Winter 2017 (No. 24 - print edition): a review of poetry, prose & art This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2017 issue, Number 24. 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 winning story and poems from the 2017 Able Muse contest winners and finalists. ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia.

Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale

Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale PDF 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.

How to Cut a Woman in Half

How to Cut a Woman in Half PDF 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.

Able Muse, Summer 2017 (No. 23 - print edition)

Able Muse, Summer 2017 (No. 23 - print edition) PDF Author: Emily Grosholz
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490079
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description


Terminal Park

Terminal Park PDF 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.

New Jersey Noir - Cape May

New Jersey Noir - Cape May PDF Author: William Baer
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490346
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
After solving the assassination case of his beloved uncle, Colt finds himself truly alone, ditched by his girlfriend. However, there’s not much respite or time for introspection for him: he’s called on again to solve a new murder case, along with a suspiciously related cold case. What follows is another gripping tale in the backdrop of the Garden State’s sights and scenes, including its picturesque beaches, casinos, and the rural Pine Barrens. In New Jersey Noir: Cape May—Book Two of his Jack Colt Murder Mystery Novels series—William Baer continues to enchant and spellbind. PRAISE FOR NEW JERSEY NOIR: CAPE MAY: In Jack Colt, William Baer gives us a private detective perfectly suited for the Garden State: gritty, charming in spite of himself, sidesplittingly hilarious and incomparably authentic. Baer proves himself the Sinatra of Noir, the Edison of Intrigue, the Springsteen of Suspense—and a rightful heir to Hammett and Chandler. Far more fun than a night out in Atlantic City or a weekend at the Jersey Shore. — Jacob M. Appel, author of Millard Salter’s Last Day PRAISE FOR WILLIAM BAER: “New Jersey Noir introduces an ultracool hometown detective from Paterson, set perfectly in his well-detailed locales. The writing is crisp, sarcastic, wryly funny, steeped in New Jersey lore and anecdotes that add great historical and cultural dimensions to its mystery.” — Robin Farrell Edmunds, Foreword Reviews (Five-star review) “A brilliant debut novel . . . precise prose, perfect pacing, stunning imagery, complex characterization, grand historical and cultural contexts, and a superb sense of place.” — Hollis Seamon, author of Somebody Up There Hates You “Not since Donna Tartt’s The Secret History have I read a novel as mesmerizing, engrossing, and delectable as William Baer’s New Jersey Noir. In prose as fast-moving as a bullet, Baer compels the reader to keep flipping pages more and more rapidly. The writing is taut and gut-wrenching.” — Terri Brown-Davidson, author of Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight “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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Baer, a recent Guggenheim fellow, is the author of twenty-two books including New Jersey Noir; Times Square and Other Stories; One-and-Twenty Tales; Companion; The Ballad Rode into Town; Formal Salutations: New & Selected Poems; Classic American Films; and The Unfortunates (recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award). A former Fulbright in Portugal, he’s also received the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award and a Creative Writing Fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts.