Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. The ABLE MUSE ANTHOLOGY celebrates Able Muse's journey through its first decade and beyond by showcasing the best of the published poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, book reviews, art and photography, including a foreword by Timothy Steele. This anthology has received high praise and acclaim from Dana Gioia, David Mason, Charles Martin, Catharine Savage-Brosman, X. J. Kennedy, Catharine Savage Brosman and others.

Able Muse Anthology

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Able Muse Press

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. ABLE MUSE WINTER 2010 is the much anticipated inaugural print edition of Able Muse Review. It is an issue filled with the usual masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art, photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse. Thus, after more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse Press begins a bold new chapter with this print edition, highlighting works of the same superlative standard as presented all these years in the online edition and the recently released ABLE MUSE ANTHOLOGY (Able Muse Press, 2011). Edited by Alexander Pepple, ABLE MUSE WINTER 2010 features work from featured poet, Richard Percival Lister, and featured artist, Massimo Sbreni, as well as work from Steve Bucknell, Nancy Lou Canyon, Emily Cutler, Marge Lurie, Peter Filkins, Stephen Collington, Marilyn L. Taylor, Julie Stoner, John Whitworth, Catharine Savage Brosman, Catherine Tufariello, David Alpaugh, Ned Balbo, Steven Winn, Leslie Monsour, Rebecca Foust, Ted Mc Carthy, Gail White, J. Patrick Lewis, Kim Bridgford, Wendy Videlock, Peter Austin, Catherine Chandler, Diane Seuss, Susan McLean, Jamie Iredell, Maryann Corbett, John Slater, John Beaton, Gilbert Wesley Purdy, Frank Osen, Trina L. Drotar, Heather Hallberg Yanda, Richard Meyer, and Kevin Corbett.

Able Muse Winter 2010

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Poetry. LINES OF FLIGHT is the first full-length collection from Catherine Chandler, an acclaimed American poet of quiet elegance whose simple style belies the range and depth of her poems. She is equally at ease with poems of nature as with those of people, relationships, landscapes and realms—the domestic, the foreign, even those scanning the vast unknown of space or the esoterica of science. These poems, carefully crafted with formal dexterity in contemporary idiom, are deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as the villanelle, sapphic, ballad, pantoum, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet—Chandler's specialty, for which she won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. "Catherine Chandler's poems—I think particularly of the sonnet "Vermont Passage"—offer the reader a plain eloquence, a keen eye, and a graceful development of thought. Elsewhere in this fine book, she puts her gifts at the service of wit, as in the little anti-poetic poem "Supernova". LINES OF FLIGHT is altogether a lively performance"—Richard Wilbur.

Lines of Flight

Chandler, Catherine

Poetry. NEVERTHELESS is the acclaimed first full-length poetry collection from American poet, Wendy Videlock. These are highly original poems written in Videlock's unique style and inimitable voice. They cover the gamut from fun, quirky, witty, to wise, in the backdrop of the slopes of the American West, through the gradients of human experience. "Mother Goose jacked up on something barely legal? No, it's Wendy Videlock, bewitching poet of the West, sister to those who have 'failed to walk on water'. There is a formal zing to these poems of anarchy and grace. Videlock reminds us that serious poetry can be fun to read. Somehow, too, she has smuggled in a bag of wisdom"—David Mason.

Nevertheless

Humor & Entertainment

Videlock, Wendy

Humor

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. ABLE MUSE SUMMER 2011 is the much-anticipated second issue of the semiannual print edition of ABLE MUSE. 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, the second print edition of ABLE MUSE is here, highlighting works of the same superlative standard as presented all these years in the online edition and the recently released ABLE MUSE ANTHOLOGY (Able Muse Press, 2011). Edited by Alexander Pepple, ABLE MUSE SUMMER 2011 features work from featured poet, Catharine Savage Brosman, and featured artist, Eleanor Leonne Bennett, as well as work from Timothy Murphy, Deborah P. Bloch, Catherine Sharpe, Traci Chee, Rachel Hadas, Andrew Waterman, David Mason, Leslie Monsour, Alexander Pepple, Reagan Upshaw, John Drury, Joanna Pearson, John Savoie, David Hedges, Brian Culhane, Rilke (Translated by Len Krisak), C. R. Resetarits, Emily Leithauser, Nicholas Friedman, Christine de Pisan (Translated by Maryann Corbett), Rory Waterman, Robert Cooperman, Mebane Robertson, and Laura Heidy-Halberstein.

Able Muse Summer 2011

Contemporary

Sailing to Babylon, James Pollock's debut collection, is filled with poems of exploration and discovery: a schoolboy's fascination with his teacher; a Bible inherited from a grandmother; an extended Dantean hike in terza rima. Pollock muses, too, on figures from Canadian history--explorers Henry Hudson, David Thompson, and John Franklin, the critic Northrop Frye, the pianist Glenn Gould. This is a collection full of surprises and pleasures, a treasure-chest mapped for discovery, "an image of the world/ made small enough to hold inside the mind." A book with the power to take you "to the place/ exactly where you always meant to go."Finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry PrizeFinalist for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award in PoetryRunner-Up for the 2013 Posner Poetry Book AwardWinner of a 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association.PRAISE FOR SAILING TO BABYLON:"The sentence, in James Pollock's remarkably assured debut volume, is a unit of music and of time, a carefully modulated choreography that moves the reader through an elegantly constructed set of meditations on place and history and the education of the self . . . . Quietly confident, formally adept, assured in their music, these artful lyrics are not only an accomplishment in themselves but promise to register, as the poet says, 'the breaking changes of a life to come'." - Mark Doty, Judge's Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist"Pollock shines brightly in 'Quarry Park,' a long poem . . . . The tight terza rima format showcases [his] poetic discipline . . . . [He] blithely hints at the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise while creating a rich complex of his own past, his son's future, the childhood games of a boy (also named James) who once lived in the quarry, the glacier called "Huge Toad" by the Huron, and the Rowan-tree mythology of the Gaels, all without losing the immediate beauty of the ecology of the place itself, rendered through carefully detailed images. The poem moves gracefully through the woods at an easy pace for over twenty pages, never making a false step or departing from the idiomatic tone, sweeping readers along through the magical dimensions of the real, and the real dimensions of the magical, showing how beautiful are "the ruins that prevail/ even in the midst of death; how we forget/ and how our forgetting makes us homeless, / until we dig ourselves out of this debt/ we owe the giant past for making us ourselves."- Brent Wood, University of Toronto Quarterly

Sailing to Babylon

Pollock, James

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. ABLE MUSE WINTER 2011 continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art &amp; photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse. This issue includes poetry by David Mason, Suzanne J. Doyle, Midge Goldberg, Catharine Savage Brosman, Amit Majmudar, Richard Wakefield, Philip Morre, Paul Bone, Maryann Corbett, Timothy Murphy, Alyce Miller, Kathryn Locey, Susan McLean, Rebecca Foust, Lyn Lifshin, Stephen Collington, George Witte, William Conelly, Lew Watts, Jean L. Kreiling, Susan McLean, John Beaton, Joshua Lavender, Catherine Chandler, Gabriel Spera, T.S. Kerrigan; fiction by Gilbert Allen, Rachel Bentley, Bruce Bromley, Keith J. Powell, Mary Widdifield, Douglas Campbell; essays by Michael Cohen, Seree Cohen Zohar, André Naffis-Sahely, Frank Osen, Andrew Frisardi; book reviews by Stephen Collington; and art by Alper Çukur.

Able Muse Winter 2011

Dirge for an Imaginary World from Matthew Buckley Smith is the winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award, selected by Andrew Hudgins. These are poems of breathtaking craftsmanship that find inspiration in the simplicity of the quotidian, or the perplexity of the grand. Smith is equally at ease musing about Neanderthals or God as he is with a ballet exam or highway medians. These poems of personal and universal introspection are filled with grace, and sparkle with abundant intelligence and wit. This masterful debut collection is an event to celebrate. PRAISE FOR DIRGE FOR AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Wildness and precision and passion balanced with wit―there are the hallmarks of Matthew Buckley Smith’s superb Dirge for an Imaginary World. In subjects great (“For the Neanderthals”) and small made great (“For the College Football Mascots”), the comic is rich with serious intent and gravity lightened with discerning wit. But only a poet who lifts heavy and unwieldy subjects―death, lost love, the absence of god―knows the imperatives of graceful balance. – Andrew Hudgins (Judge, 2011 Able Muse Book Award) In this deeply impressive debut volume of poetry, Dirge for an Imaginary World, Matthew Buckley Smith delivers a remarkable range of deft formal schemes, temporal movements, and varied settings. We encounter sonnets, couplets, quatrains, Sapphics, sestets and so forth written with a slick, delightful merging of technical expertise and smooth contemporary rhythms. The range of subjects is equally and as charmingly eclectic, from Neanderthals, Dante, Vermeer, for instance, to College Football Mascots, Highway Mediums, and Spring Ballet Exams. Mental and linguistic agility generously challenge the reader in poem after poem. – Greg Williamson (from the “Foreword”) “If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,” wrote Thomas Hardy, whose spirit moves through the fine poems of Matthew Buckley Smith’s debut collection. Like his blast-beruffled predecessor, Smith braves a clear-eyed look at our fallen world, mourning in elegantly precise language the sorrows inherent in “set(ting) out to map a promised land/ Out of reach and always just at hand,” but also wishing great mercy upon us travelers failed and failing. These are poems full of both reckoning and grace, made all the more beautiful for their humane wisdom. Dirge for an Imaginary World is immensely impressive. – Carrie Jerrell ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Matthew Buckley Smith was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his MFA in poetry at the Johns Hopkins University. His poems have appeared, or will soon appear in various magazines, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, The Alabama Literary Review, Think Journal, and Best American Poetry 2011. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Joanna.

Dirge for an Imaginary World: Poems

Smith, Matthew

Poetry. With a Foreword by Charles Martin. THE COSMIC PURR is the first collection of original poetry from Aaron Poochigian, well-known for his translations of Sappho, Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes. From the mythical to everyday themes, from the landscape of North Dakota to scenes in a bar, at a marriage ceremony, before birth or before death, Poochigian's verse is enlightened by uncommonly fresh wisdom, and deployed in the delightfully masterful, elegant and naturally-flowing metrical forms his translations are known for. "Aaron Poochigian's technique is masterly, the tone tends to be tart, disillusioned, cryptic, and elegant, and it's easy to be beguiled by these poems' wit and bravura. But the pyrotechnics are used to serious ends, and the scenes that are fitfully illuminated, whether they occur in landscapes as quotidian as contemporary North Dakota or as otherworldly as mythical Greece, whether they are chilling or exhilarating, are always immediate in their reality, and they speak to the reader with a compelling cogency."—Dick Davis "Aaron Poochigian is both a classicist and a neo-classical poet. By this I mean that he prefers as subjects the common occasions of our lives and articulates them uncommonly, in verse rich with the kind of detail that becomes a style passed on in an act of friendship between him and the poets of the past who have served as his mentors."—Charles Martin "It is a delight to have some of Aaron Poochigian's modern New York replies to famous Sappho poems. Reading them is like eavesdropping on a New York wise guy discussing the 'night before' with a classical scholar: sexy, witty, learned, and moving. Worth hearing, worth re-reading, too."—Diana Der-Hovanessian "What is the cosmic purr? Pussycat poet Aaron Poochigian is the one to show us in his ebullient lines. He returns where he started—to the northern plains—then spins on a dime to the wider world 'where life was all night long / drinking and dancing, bursting into song.' In 'The Parlor' he nods ironically to his Armenian heritage, and a few pages later he lights an elegiac candle for a dying friend. A major translator from classical Greek, Poochigian offers in his own poetry a hip formality, a timeless sense of the contemporary, and when he brings the classics into this scene they live again as freshly as ever."—David Mason

The Cosmic Purr

Poochigian, Aaron

Life in the Second Circle is the first collection from Michael Cantor, finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. Cantor's poetry globe-trots in time and place. It teems with such culturally diverse characters and scenes as Genghis Khan and Muhammad Ali; a pithy mise-en-scène of a Venice travelogue; Brighton Beach in Florida and its natives or turistas; and what can happen in Japan on tatami mats or behind shoji screens, whether you’re a geisha or samurai or gaijin. His themes span the mystical to the hard-edged and “badass,” fluently deployed in formal poems in received or nonce forms and free verse. From the narrative to the imagistic and even the surreal, Cantor's versecraft is eclectic, brimming with wit and wisdom, and realized with the craft of a master storyteller. He has created a collection of unique pleasures not to be missed. PRAISE FOR LIFE IN THE SECOND CIRCLE: Dante’s second circle of hell was reserved for sins of lust, but Cantor’s narrator does not judge his infernal cast of characters; rather, he causes us to identify with their essential human neediness. What’s more, he does so through a cinematic gift for storytelling and a mastery of poetic form. – Julie Kane Michael Cantor uses words to paint and sculpt the world. He writes the world too―which I don’t say as an afterthought, since verbal wit is Cantor’s forte. Life in the Second Circle is a sensory kaleidoscope where the poems are more like movies. – Deborah Warren (from the “Foreword”) To be called “a poet’s poet” passes for a compliment among poets. Michael Cantor is another, rarer kind of poet―let’s say “a novelist’s poet.” This poet knows things that writers of fiction know about writing, and that other poets ignore at their peril. This extraordinary collection is testament to his unaffected generosity and genuine interest in other people, qualities that make him good company in person and in print. – Alfred Nicol This is not your mother’s book of poems. – Wendy Videlock Like Muhammad Ali, one of the “Box Men” he celebrates in a virtuosic crown of sonnets, Cantor is a master of floating like a butterfly in a small, roped-off space. In his hands the most formidably difficult forms―villanelles, triolets, Petrarchan sonnets, sestinas, ballades, and equally rigorous stanzas of his own invention―become spurs to imaginative freedom. Like the vividly drawn characters who populate Life in the Second Circle, we are constantly reminded that one never knows where life will go, or how or when or where. But it’s a pleasure to be along for the ride. – Catherine Tufariello ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Cantor’s work has appeared in Measure, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, Umbrella, SCR, Margie, Chimaera and numerous other journals, e-zines and anthologies. His honors include the New England Poetry Club Erika Mumford (2006) and Gretchen Warren (2008) Prizes. He has been a finalist or semifinalist in the Howard Nemerov, Donald Justice, Richard Wilbur and Morton Marr Award competitions. A chapbook, The Performer, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Europe and Latin America, and now lives on Plum Island, MA.

Life in the Second Circle: Poems

Cantor, Michael

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