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The gun-toting woman holds enormous symbolic significance in American culture. For over two centuries, women who pick up guns have disrupted the popular association of guns and masculinity, spurring debates about women's capabilities for violence as well as their capacity for full citizenship. In Her Best Shot, Laura Browder examines the relationship between women and guns and the ways in which the figure of the armed woman has served as a lightning rod for cultural issues. Utilizing autobiographies, advertising, journalism, novels, and political tracts, among other sources, Browder traces appearances of the armed woman across a chronological spectrum from the American Revolution to the pres...
In Ben Berman’s second full-length collection, Figuring in the Figure, poems laden with aphorisms, puns, and witticisms meditate on shapes, angles, thinking about thinking, marriage, and the joys and trials of bringing a daughter into the world, among others. Sometimes with a Frostian spirit, sometimes with a touch of Zen, the known is questioned and wisdom gleaned from daily experience. This is a book that challenges us to reimagine the familiar, both physical and spiritual, while reminding us not to “wander through this world without wonder.” PRAISE FOR FIGURING IN THE FIGURE: “Because design, alone, doesn’t hold weight,/” Ben Berman writes in his remarkable second collection o...
Rhina P. Espaillat’s And after All meditates on the passage of time. The perspective sweeps from the panorama of foreign landmarks to the close view of a lover’s feet in failing health, held and cared for. And after All displays the wit, wisdom, subtle voice, and supple mastery of forms that have established Espaillat as a contemporary master. This long-awaited collection from Espaillat is a treat not to be missed. PRAISE FOR AND AFTER ALL Rhina P. Espaillat’s And After All combines the formal fluency of Richard Wilbur, the precision of Elizabeth Bishop, and the easy conversational tones of Frank O’Hara, and yet her poems speak in a voice that is distinctively her own. They address t...
Emily Grosholz weaves elements of philosophy, mathematics and the sciences into her experience of the social and natural world, to produce wise and cosmopolitan poetry of high lyricism. The Stars of Earth starts with new poems chronicling the months of a year lived and observed, followed by selections from Grosholz’s previous volumes in chronological order. This rare treasury spans four decades of Grosholz’s acclaimed poetry. PRAISE FOR THE STARS OF EARTH: Emily Grosholz is a poet of radiant intelligence, patient lyricism, and meticulous craft. She has a gifted naturalist’s regard for the living world and wherever she looks that world, for its part, offers her its poetry. With a philos...
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.
Sea Level Rising, John Philip Drury’s fourth collection, revels in water—flowing through rivers, splashing on quays and docked vessels, the wake of speeding boats, the elusive tang of sea salt in the heart of the prairie, even the water of baptism that rebirths the believer. The uplifting lure of water, as with a pair of honeymooners in Venice, may inspire a love “eager to divorce/ anything impeding its energy.” Our state of being might mirror water’s when “everything’s in flux, repeated spasms/ of wake and wave, bright sun, reflecting pool,/ surges made up of intricate detail.” The waves of music, like those of water, are also prominent in the musings of this collection, whe...
Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
Carol Light’s Heaven from Steam, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, moves effortlessly from the humorous to the serious, from mundane concerns to sublime. She writes as convincingly of carnal pleasures as of spiritual mysteries. Light’s playful energy is imbued with pleasing rhythms and sonic patterns. With surprising wordplay and associations, she renders complex vistas as understandable simplicities, finds fresh, inventive turns of phrase that will remain with the reader. Her multifarious themes include questions of faith, divorce, childbearing, cathedrals, the Pacific Northwest, the Prairies, Italy—especially Rome—and beyond. This visionary debut collection will delight...
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 wit...
In Sally Thomas’s Motherland, the poet keenly observes the ephemeral and the everlasting in the lens of time-the daily into seasonal transformations, the gifts and wonders of nature and people. Motherland by turns hails and interrogates in matters of flesh, of faith and spirituality-especially so in the “Richeldis of Walsingham” poem sequence. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a collection abounding in insight, hope, grace, surprises, and yes, love. PRAISE FOR MOTHERLAND: A core of spiritual knowledge resides in the poems of Sally Thomas’s Motherland- knowledge that might seem strange to the poet herself, in fact, though it definitely resides in her, and radiates throughou...