Rise above the River (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Rise above the River (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF Author: Kelly Rowe
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773491091
Category : Poetry
Languages : da
Pages : 74

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Kelly Rowe’s Rise above the River, we find a sister powerless to redress her brother’s fall from grace after the trauma of his childhood sexual abuse by a female authority figure. Rise above the River interrogates in a quest for answer, meaning, reason, justice, and mercy—along the way, exploring the conceit of the fallen angel with ekphrases on artwork such as Alexandre Cabanel’s L’ange déchu and Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel. This powerful and emotionally charged collection is the winner of the 2021 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR RISE ABOVE THE RIVER Lucifer, Ismene, Alexander the Great, “an obscure Civil War hero,” a Florida railroad, “the dead middle of Mississippi,” an apron swaying and twisting on a clothesline—with these figures and images, as well as with letters and visits, memories and dreams, Kelly Rowe enables us to assemble a story that can’t be told directly, to compose a picture that can’t be faced head-on. And the limpid diction and confiding tone of Rise above the River both soften and strengthen a narrative voice that finds many ways to tell the ineffable. —Rachel Hadas, author of Pandemic Almanac In this haunting book of poems, a sister remembers her younger brother, who as a child seemed always to emit a golden light to match his golden boy-soprano voice. Adventurous, imaginative, a lover of trees and water, he was more Huck Finn than angel. Then, as Randall Jarrell once observed, something went wrong. Could it have been innate or could it have been, as the poet suspects, the ill attentions of one of her brother’s teachers, a woman who was never properly called out for her abuse? The lyrical reminiscences of the older sister, as she watches her brother grow in his estrangement, his greed, his inability to feel for others, contrast painfully with these aspects of his life and character. This is a beautifully written book about a man whose fall is irredeemable. The mystery is why. This is a shattering book of poems about lost innocence and beauty. —Mark Jarman, 2021 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Heronry From personal recounting and reflection to rethinking classical mythology, this collection presents an eclectic, engaging contemplation throughout, underscored by a haunting and often surprising rhyme that ties us doubly to the moment we are reading. In reading these poems, we are so often starkly surprised by the strong, sure leaps—“Snow falling. / Her white feet. / Her aria.” Sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly, these poems lead us into their important mix. The several reconciliations at the end draw these poems into closing, but in their moment they gift us with a persuasive sense of greater connection to things simply and innately significant—underscored by profound feeling. —Alberto Ríos, author of The World Has Need of You ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kelly Rowe’s chapbook Flying South on the Back of a Dove was published by the Texas Review Press in January 2019. Her second chapbook, Child Bed Fever, was selected for the 2021 Rane Arroyo Series, and published by Seven Kitchens Press in November 2022. She has recently published poems in journals including North American Review, New Ohio Review, 32 Poems, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, and New Letters. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and works as a volunteer attorney, representing undocumented women.

Rise above the River (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Rise above the River (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) PDF Author: Kelly Rowe
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773491091
Category : Poetry
Languages : da
Pages : 74

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Kelly Rowe’s Rise above the River, we find a sister powerless to redress her brother’s fall from grace after the trauma of his childhood sexual abuse by a female authority figure. Rise above the River interrogates in a quest for answer, meaning, reason, justice, and mercy—along the way, exploring the conceit of the fallen angel with ekphrases on artwork such as Alexandre Cabanel’s L’ange déchu and Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel. This powerful and emotionally charged collection is the winner of the 2021 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR RISE ABOVE THE RIVER Lucifer, Ismene, Alexander the Great, “an obscure Civil War hero,” a Florida railroad, “the dead middle of Mississippi,” an apron swaying and twisting on a clothesline—with these figures and images, as well as with letters and visits, memories and dreams, Kelly Rowe enables us to assemble a story that can’t be told directly, to compose a picture that can’t be faced head-on. And the limpid diction and confiding tone of Rise above the River both soften and strengthen a narrative voice that finds many ways to tell the ineffable. —Rachel Hadas, author of Pandemic Almanac In this haunting book of poems, a sister remembers her younger brother, who as a child seemed always to emit a golden light to match his golden boy-soprano voice. Adventurous, imaginative, a lover of trees and water, he was more Huck Finn than angel. Then, as Randall Jarrell once observed, something went wrong. Could it have been innate or could it have been, as the poet suspects, the ill attentions of one of her brother’s teachers, a woman who was never properly called out for her abuse? The lyrical reminiscences of the older sister, as she watches her brother grow in his estrangement, his greed, his inability to feel for others, contrast painfully with these aspects of his life and character. This is a beautifully written book about a man whose fall is irredeemable. The mystery is why. This is a shattering book of poems about lost innocence and beauty. —Mark Jarman, 2021 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Heronry From personal recounting and reflection to rethinking classical mythology, this collection presents an eclectic, engaging contemplation throughout, underscored by a haunting and often surprising rhyme that ties us doubly to the moment we are reading. In reading these poems, we are so often starkly surprised by the strong, sure leaps—“Snow falling. / Her white feet. / Her aria.” Sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly, these poems lead us into their important mix. The several reconciliations at the end draw these poems into closing, but in their moment they gift us with a persuasive sense of greater connection to things simply and innately significant—underscored by profound feeling. —Alberto Ríos, author of The World Has Need of You ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kelly Rowe’s chapbook Flying South on the Back of a Dove was published by the Texas Review Press in January 2019. Her second chapbook, Child Bed Fever, was selected for the 2021 Rane Arroyo Series, and published by Seven Kitchens Press in November 2022. She has recently published poems in journals including North American Review, New Ohio Review, 32 Poems, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, and New Letters. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and works as a volunteer attorney, representing undocumented women.

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

Get Book Here

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.

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

Get Book Here

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

Get Book Here

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.

In Code

In Code PDF Author: Maryann Corbett
Publisher: Able Muse Press
ISBN: 1773490540
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Code was born out of Maryann Corbett’s years of work for the Minnesota Legislature, with a nonpartisan office that mandated that she maintain a public silence about politics. In poems that go from elegiac to fiery to funny, she examines behind-the-scenes legislative labor and the people who do it, the tensions of working for government in a climate hostile to government, and the buildings and grounds that put a beautiful face on a history full of ambiguities. This well-honed collection, Corbett's fifth, reflects on doublespeak and public poses; on coworkers and commutes; on legalese, courts, and elections; on news and history; and at last on retirement—through poems masterfully deployed in a dazzling array of forms: including the prose poem, the sonnet, the ghazal, the villanelle, and the canzone. Maryann Corbett is a candid, wistful, purposeful, and meditative poet in command of her craft. Of her years working for the Minnesota Legislature, Maryann Corbett writes in Rattle: "There was the frisson supplied by the constant presence of the media, the satisfaction of believing one's work served the public, the thrill of working with smart, motivated people, the pleasure of being surrounded by the striking buildings and gardens of the Capitol grounds, the sense of history. There was also the uncomfortable awareness that with every legislative session there are winners and losers, and that the same battles for justice are fought, and often lost, by the same people, year after year." In Code features poems that reflect on both those pleasures and that discomfort, as in these lines from "Seven Little Poems about Making Laws": Capitol café: German proverbs, whitewashed since 1917, are restored to view with bright applause. Old hatreds have new objects now. PRAISE FOR MARYANN CORBETT: Ned Balbo: . . . an extraordinary poet. Tony Barnstone: . . . metrical poetry infused with gorgeous imagery and the vernacular of our scientized world. Richard Wilbur: . . . accurate and delightful. Rhina P. Espaillat: . . . every section touches me and keeps calling me back. A.M. Juster: . . . wit without meanness, warmth without sentimentality, and craft without pretension. Geoffrey Brock: . . . one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry. Marilyn Taylor: . . . poignant, perceptive, exquisitely formed poems . . . a poet to be genuinely grateful for. Peter Campion: . . . a poet of the first order. Willis Barnstone: . . . a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Susan McLean: . . . a stunner. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English in 1981, with a specialization in medieval literature and linguistics. She expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She is the author of five books of poetry and is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her work is widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

Flying South on the Back of a Dove

Flying South on the Back of a Dove PDF Author: Kelly Rowe
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1680031716
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Flying South on the Back of a Dove, Kelly Rowe writes of loss: loss of life, of innocence, of love. She explores how our losses weigh on us, and how we shoulder and carry them through our lives. These poems are also about return: to a South that is the landscape of childhood, an Eden that exists only in memory and in dreams. Describing an arc from childhood to middle age, the poems confront the brutality of everyday existence, from suicide to domestic violence to murder, but also celebrate how we reach for hope, so elusive and so necessary. The Traveling Salesman’s Wife On Mondays you drive off to your other life; I lie in bed and wonder if you have another wife, in Pearson, or Baxley, or Florida somewhere, waiting up as I do, Wednesday and Friday nights . . .

Good Books, Good Times!

Good Books, Good Times! PDF Author: Lee Bennett Hopkins
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0064462226
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lee Bennet Hopkins, noted anthologist and educator, has collected a group of witty and whimsical poems that celebrate the joy of reading. Karla Kuskin, Jack Prelutsky, and Arnold Lobel are just a few of the acclaimed children's book authors whose poems are joined into this delightful ode to the world of words. Wonderfully wacky illustrations by Harvey Stevenson help make this a rollicking good book--and a rollicking good time.

If You Listen

If You Listen PDF Author: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Publisher: Western Reflections Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781890437008
Category : San Juan Mountains (Colo. and N.M.)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This stunning book of poetry and black and white photography will bring the awe-inspiring San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado to you in way you have never before experienced. The poetry flows like the sparkling mountain streams that Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer so vividly describes. By use of a specially designed printing process, the magnificent photographs of Eileen Benjamin are so sharp and clear that every little detail can be seen. This volume makes a perfect gift or a wonderful remembrance of one of the most beautiful spots on earth.

Archaic Smile

Archaic Smile PDF Author: A. E. Stallings
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374600732
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 77

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new edition of A. E. Stallings's first book of poems, which was awarded the Richard Wilbur Award. In Archaic Smile, by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist A. E. Stallings, the poet couples poetic meditations on classic stories and themes with poems about the everyday, sometimes mundane occurrences of contemporary life (like losing an umbrella or fishing with one’s father), and she infuses the latter with the magic of myth and history. With the skill of a scholar and translator and the playful, pristine composition of a poet, Stallings bridges the gap between these two distant worlds. Stallings “invigorates the old forms and makes them sing” (Meryl Natchez, ZYZZYVA) in her poetry, and the scope and origins of her talents are on full display in the acclaimed author's first collection. The poems of Archaic Smile are sung with a timeless, technically impeccable, and utterly true voice.

The Best American Poetry 1996

The Best American Poetry 1996 PDF Author: David Lehman
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9780684814513
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Simon & Schuster, in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry 1996 is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.