Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes - Poems

Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes - Poems
Author: Barbara Ellen Sorensen
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2013-12-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409241
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Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes embraces the many joys of spirit and flesh, while acknowledging that death is an ever-present shadow. Her lyrics sometime sear, sometime soar, and are rooted in nature and her lived environment—arroyos, tundra, riparian forests—and further abroad in Haiti and Milan. These poems sing of the body both beauteous and bountiful, and contrapuntally lament trials of illness and surgery. The spirit of her lost son pervades her musings. Incantatory and mystical, she offers us “bells and charms/ that only girls can cast out like handfuls of sugar/ across any universe,/ any threshold.” This collection richly rewards its reader. Its release is an event to celebrate. PRAISE FOR COMPOSITIONS OF THE DEAD PLAYING FLUTES: Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes is a book of stunning wakefulness. For it is a wake, but at the same time a celebration, one that focuses on places where the dead were once most alive, places where we are most acutely seen and heard. Here they are deserts, seascapes, landscapes with families. Like the bird wings that so often lift this stunning debut, Sorensen’s flight is full of gravity: “One day you are as light/ as a bird, and then/ you are not.” We stay aloft by living, by insisting on the protean body of the world. Sorensen’s gift is elegy’s clear song, how it may conjure grace from serious illness, car crash, the loss of a child. “The universe bears no flatness. Even its horizon is curved toward repetition. Your death is a horizon. I run to slip over its edge.” Yet we don’t, we stay. By honoring, each to each, our essential complexity, Sorensen reminds us love’s true service is survival. —Matthew Cooperman These poems are attentive, scrupulous, and transforming, as they range from the sensuous to the spiritual . . . Opened in body and spirit, the poet embraces her worlds, and she offers back this poetry, which shimmers in its urgent, delicate balance. —Veronica Patterson (from the foreword) Barbara Ellen Sorensen is a lyric poet in the sense that any fabulist might be called lyric—a modern Ovid offering metamorphoses of the triumphs and ashes of human existence in a voice at once deeply personal and entirely of us all. Mystic, mythographer, trickster and elegiast, Sorensen engages subjects that would be ashes in the mouth of a lesser poet—relief work in Haiti, brain surgery, and most devastatingly, the death of a son—with Orphic transformation and the deep truth of stories we tell ourselves by the fire to keep ourselves alive. From the formal mastery of poems like “My Lithium, My Heart” to the exquisite free verse of “Doubting Cremation” (“the beauty of a body/ torn twice from mine, because all mothers/ repeat the births of children who die”), Sorensen gives us, in her Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes, the record of her epic travels, her trips to the underworld, and along with that, the words that will save us. —Suzanne Paola

All the Wasted Beauty of the World - Poems

All the Wasted Beauty of the World - Poems
Author: Richard Newman
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409322
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All the Wasted Beauty of the World, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, extols the beautiful as readily as it expounds on the blemished. The reasoned commingles with the rambunctious, as in the case of the speaker who declares that “our lives span diaper to diaper,/ and in between we piss on anyone/ we can.” Little escapes notice in these poems of gutsy realism and formal deftness, which freely highlight the fringes of society-the speaker in “Bellefontaine Cemetery” exhorts teens to “party on people’s graves” and have “a few close shaves with county sheriffs,” the carcass of a Ford truck intrudes on a hiking trail’s gully, the homeless are lullabied to “find rest behind our dumpster/ . . . score a fifth of bourbon/ and find your stomach full.” Richard Newman brings us a collection that prods and soars with the grit and beauty of the real world. PRAISE FOR ALL THE WASTED BEAUTY OF THE WORLD: Richard Newman’s All the Wasted Beauty of the World is masterful and magnetic, from the “galaxy of gnats” hovering in the St. Louis twilight to the way a backwoods junkyard “gnaws on a pile of old Ford bones.” He sees a group of bored high school kids with “nothing to lose/ but stupid summer jobs and innocence,” and captures with perfect acuity how “September rain in streetlight/ silvers the cypress needles, scatters new dimes/ among the nuisance alley mulberry trees.” Newman’s poems, with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible portraits of life in the cheap bars, back alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, surprise a hunger in us for a language larger, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than daily speech. -George Bilgere, author of Imperial The poems in Richard Newman's remarkable third collection, All the Wasted Beauty of the World, are heady explorers. They roam from Lost Man Pass to Benton Park, from downtown St. Louis to Southern Indiana, all the while balancing gorgeous musicality with lyric originality. In the midst of the wandering, there is longing in these poems-for place, for order, for morning. There is urgency, too, and beauty, wasted and otherwise, in places we don't always expect it. Newman is a bold and masterful formalist in a free-verse world, and he uses sonnets, aubades, villanelles, and odes to reconcile the geographies of the interior and exterior. Again and again, this collection makes us recalibrate our true north and forces us to reconsider the world for all of the unpredictable places where we can find beauty. -Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke Newman uses the power of recollection and imagery to craft odes, sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and free verse with titles like “Four Kids Pissing off the Overpass after a Cardinals Game.” Each poem calls our attention to a rough-and-tumble, everyday America we often drive past but overlook. All the Wasted Beauty of the World returns us to the real and, consequently, the new by putting on the brakes and asking us to look, if only briefly, beyond our rear-views. -Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

Vellum - Poems

Vellum - Poems
Author: Chelsea Woodard
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2014-11-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409365
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Chelsea Woodard’s Vellum, a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, propels the reader along new paths of discovery in the quotidian as in the mythical. Its scope is far-ranging: a flower press received as a gift in childhood, Tarot reading with a favorite aunt, unexpected reflections at a tattoo parlor, reminiscing about an old flame, the discovery of rare volumes at the local library, or auctioning off old toys on eBay. Woodward’s insights and sensibilities in the visual and performing arts are deftly realized in fine or broad strokes-as in “Coppélia,” “The Painter and the Color-blind,” “Degas’s Nudes,” or as in “Still Life,” which muses that “It’s difficult/ to give back life/ to what’s been cut off from the living.” Stories and scenes represented in popular artwork are reimagined in ekphrastics such as "Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting." With excursions into the surreal, myth is made, lived or remade, as in “Philomela,” “Pegasus” and “The Feral Child.” This is an exquisite debut collection that rewards the mind and senses with its formal impetus and deft musicality, its precise and lively language, its emotional compass. PRAISE FOR VELLUM: In her stunning first collection, Vellum, Chelsea Woodard offers us poems whose lucidity of attention grounds an imaginative realism where narrative becomes speculation, witness becomes mystery, and the body a space where desire and dread complicate compassion’s summons to the social order. The honed music here thus reveals a deeper vulnerability. Such is its gift, the way in which poems might be rooted to the difficulty and heartbreak of the physical and yet apart, “their keel and gristle finally set/ into some deathless, disembodied flight.” An astonishing book. -Bruce Bond In addition to her emotional maturity, part of what makes these poems memorable is Woodard's obvious mastery of language, her flawless sentences, the surprising way those sentences function and "mean" within the lines, the lines within the forms. -Claudia Emerson (from the foreword) Not the least of the attractions of this gifted young poet's first book is the exquisite, searing precision of her language-the obsessively exact diction; the tropes that map with such stunning accuracy the emotional contours of her narratives; the gestural, almost tactile quality of her syntax-all of these talents focused sharply on what Howard Nemerov said was the singular, most difficult achievement of poetry: "getting something right in language." I predict for Chelsea Woodard a long and enviable career. -B.H. Fairchild

Greed: A Confession - Poems

Greed: A Confession - Poems
Author: D.R. Goodman
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2014-12-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409373
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Greed: A Confession showcases D.R. Goodman’s honed sensitivity to the human experience and the natural world around us. Her sensible scientific background melds with a meditative outlook: “this// is a vertebra/ from a cow.// It will win no prize./ It is just the childish wonder/ from which the rest derives.” This collection is a wellspring of keen observations, insight and secrets of nature, freely spilling out for those greedy for knowledge and enlightenment—as in the immediacy of “a certain joy/ that depends on nothing” and “wraps a tightness around your heart.” Here is a masterfully crafted finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award—one brimming with delight, wit and insight. PRAISE FOR GREED: A CONFESSION I feel incredibly fortunate to have learned of D. R. Goodman’s poetry. Her technical control and powers of observation are extraordinary; diction, meter, and rhyming, superb. Writing about an egret, she details its “mind,/ a laser-focused eye, the weight of will”—attributes that apply equally to the poet. In “Autumn in a Place Without Winter,” she says, “The season brings/ no clarity, but this: we’re here, alive. . . .” This poet is alive to everything. You want this book. It’s terrific. —Kelly Cherry Goodman is greedy for things of this world—not in the rapacious, bottom-line manner of plutocrats, misers, and Wall Street brokers but for the enlightenment of the senses and the enrichment of her poetry. She’s sharing the wealth she accumulates. —John Drury (from the foreword) At the core of Greed: A Confession are natural ironies, or disjunctures, or improbabilities replete with intrigue. The poems are frames through which we view the events. D.R. Goodman is a scientist of natural history, which, for her, includes human experience. The poet shows us how to see. The deep pleasure she takes in the process displays itself, with characteristic irony, in “A Certain Joy.” —Clive Matson D.R. Goodman’s carefully crafted poems register a deep appreciation of the intricate meanings emanating from Nature’s tangible riches. “Depth cannot hide” from Goodman’s keen eye. “And so it flutters, sings,/ Betrays itself upon the face of things.” From the sudden appearance of a hundred tiny, freshly metamorphosed frogs, to ginkgo leaves’ brilliant, moonlit gold that “spurs imagination to those old/ heroic, dangerous quests of greed and sin,” the wondrous wealth of existence evokes joy that compels the poet to confess her “greed” in the presence of such good fortune. Even the blithe partake of a “certain joy”—certain: particular and definite—that is not attained or stumbled upon; it simply is—the gift of being: “There is a certain joy/ that depends on nothing./ One inhabits it./ It is there in the day/ when you walk out, whether chill and gray/ or magnified by light, and you inhale it.” Complex yet accessible, these formal and free-verse poems gift us with abundant insights to enjoy. —Beth Houston

Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art - Winter 2013 (No. 16 - print edition)

Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art - Winter 2013 (No. 16 - print edition)
Author: Alexander Pepple
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1927409284
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This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2013 issue, Number 16. 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: WITH THE 2013 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. With the winner and runner-up sonnets from the 2013 Able Muse / Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-Off. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Peter Svensson. FEATURED POET - Jehanne Dubrow; (Interviewed by Anna M. Evans). FICTION - Cheryl Diane Kidder, Charles Wilkinson, Blaine Vitallo, Donna Laemmlen. ESSAYS - A.E. Stallings, Peter Byrne, Philip Morre, David Mason, Chrissy Mason. BOOK REVIEWS - Rory Waterman, Jane Hammons. POETRY - Rachel Hadas, R.S. Gwynn, Catharine Savage Brosman, John Savoie, D.R. Goodman, Jeanne Wagner, Richard Wakefield, Melissa Balmain, Tara Tatum, Anna M. Evans, Matthew Buckley Smith, Stephen Harvey, Elise Hempel, Marly Youmans, Amanda Luecking Frost, Rachael Briggs, Chris Childers, James Matthew Wilson, Alex Greenberg, Catullus, Sappho, Theocritus.

Asperity Street - Poems

Asperity Street - Poems
Author: Gail White
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2015-08-31
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409551
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Asperity Street, Gail White’s most balanced poetry collection, explores the breadth of human existence with cutting wit, irreverence, keen intelligence, and an uncommon mix of empathy and asperity. Besides the cynical or the lighthearted, which are hallmarks of White’s work, there is a newfound earnestness and gravity in these poems in their survey and interrogation of the human condition. White journeys the span from nursery to hospice—in between, she navigates the prom, family occasions, mating, gossip, and money matters with masterful formal dexterity. This is a collection that rewards the reader with a thoroughly entertaining and illuminating experience. PRAISE FOR ASPERITY STREET: In her remarkable collection, Asperity Street, Gail White takes on the whole sweep of existence. The street becomes the road of a lifetime, beginning with a Southern childhood and ending with a hospice finale. Laconic, ironic and comic, White’s drily resourceful, wickedly companionable voice takes aim on patrimony, matrimony, religion, money and the myth that assumes we choose our lives. With her sublime linguistic choreography, these poems dance to complex metrical tunes. We feel and hear them pulse with equal parts sympathy and vitriol. In Gail White’s capable hands, Asperity Street unfolds as a brilliant mural we can return to again and again, as the poet does—still vulnerable, and wiser each time. — Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Gail White has done it again: here is another collection by one of America’s wittiest, most technically adept, funniest and most serious commentators on what it feels like to be human. — Rhina P. Espaillat (from the foreword), author of Her Place in These Designs I looked forward to reading Gail White’s new book of poems, Asperity Street, because I know she is one of America’s funniest poets, so when I got the manuscript I sat down to read it immediately. I knew how much I would enjoy it. I was not disappointed. The first three sections of this four-part collection have wit and bon mots in good measure, socko endings, words I’d never seen in poems before, like “cloaca” or a made-up word ending, “substituth,” to satisfy a droll rhyme. But nothing prepared me for part four. Nothing procedural changed. The insights were as sharp as ever, the language exact and clear, the cleverness and dexterity with form as deft, the music as mesmerizing . . . but this was a serious poet I’d not encountered before: there was a deepening of vision, an enhancement of feeling, the rueful treatment of life and death took on a cutting edge that slices to the bone. Don’t miss reading this book. — Lewis Turco, author of The Book of Forms

The Blind Loon - A Bestiary

The Blind Loon - A Bestiary
Author: Ed Shacklee
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409861
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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.

Uncontested Grounds - Poems

Uncontested Grounds - Poems
Author: William Conelly
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409403
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Uncontested Grounds, William Conelly’s first full-length collection of poetry, is eclectic in people and places, deftly moving from vineyard to beach, to a Hollywood filmmaking set, and even to the cockpit of a jet fighter. This is also a collection of contrasts-the din of war in “The Lead Man” versus the “hot reductive shore” of “R & R,” the tragedy of suicide in “Ernest in Elysium” versus the stir of the unborn “In the Ninth Month.” This collection of masterfully crafted poems of vivid insights, often delivered with minimalist verve and directness, is fittingly a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR UNCONTESTED GROUNDS: Uncontested Grounds is a splendid, memorable book. The stylistic precision and trim architecture of these poems may remind us of Edgar Bowers and other California formalists. William Conelly, however, has a voice all his own-shrewd, wry, engaging. Even in his more expansive pieces he writes with epigrammatic force. The perceptions fueling his art are equally alert to the world’s kindness and cruelty, and his work is impressive not only for its elegance but for its quality of lived experience-in short, for a kind of wisdom rarely found these days in verse. -Robert B. Shaw This generous collection of the poems of William Conelly is all the more welcome for being long overdue. Here is a poet who finds extraordinary dimensions in ordinary experience, as in “Treasure” and “The Ford Birthday Ode,” two memorable moments of childhood; as in “Aubade,” “The Sailor,” “Memento,” and “In the Ninth Month”-this last from the point of view of a woman about to give birth. Conelly commands both strict form and free verse, and his language is often fresh and unexpected. Uncontested Grounds will stand as a notable book in this or any year. -X.J. Kennedy Midwestern by birth, William Conelly has lived on both US coasts, as well as in England and the Middle East. He is smart and imaginative, and brings a thriving intelligence to life’s experiences. I found the poems in Uncontested Grounds original, diverse, and lucid. Many are poems of place. The first of these features a bankrupt farmer who ponders the “blue, remorseless beauty” that first lured him onto the stricken acreage he must sell. But the places vary, and some exude enchantment. I am taken by the touch of a drowsy wife’s feet in “Aubade,” and the couple along Florida’s “Gulf Coast” pitying “those who’ll wake alone.” Conelly writes so well, in a variety of forms, I initially absorbed his insights heedless of their traditional underpinnings. These poems easily bear rereading then; they compose a fine selection from one of our best writers. -William J. Smith

Animal Psalms - Poems

Animal Psalms - Poems
Author: Alfred Nicol
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2016-05-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409705
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Alfred Nicol’s Animal Psalms begins with the baseball field’s organized uncertainties, and continues on many a trajectory of animal ruminations—with the human species well accounted for—ending in the imbalance of the everyday “Nuts” around us. The subjects include the elephant, snake, sheep, skunk, bee, couple dynamics, the trials and triumphs of the ruler or the everyman. This is a collection rich in aphorisms on the bright and shady spectra of our interactions. Recognizable soliloquies with the meditative self or dialogues with the beloved are unraveled for keen insights on the human condition—deconstructing them until the knotty connecting threads are exposed. Nicol gives us a mature collection of quiet reflection, with wit and wisdom deployed through finely crafted poems of masterly formal dexterity. PRAISE FOR ANIMAL PSALMS: Dear reader, I’ve fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too. Read, for instance, the very last poem, “Nuts,” and read the great “How to Ignore an Invisible Man,” and you’re hooked forever. Read all the rest, these poems by Alfred Nicol which have our numbers, and have his own too, that tell about our lives, and his, and the lives of snakes, and bees, and elephants, with such humor, and pity, and praise, for all of us, human and animal, in our situations. It’s impossible not to fall in love. —David Ferry, author of Bewilderment, winner of the National Book Award As the title Animal Psalms suggests, there is reverence here—a reverence that derives less from religion than from a religious attention to the things of the world, from baseball games to zoo elephants to the newly beloved. Nicol is a melodic writer, called first to the music of words, to “speech that lets the sound/ carry the greater part of what is said.” He’s also a poet whose images you won’t soon forget. They summon the real world and simultaneously render it otherworldly. While the poems offer moments of ecstatic escape, they’re more often held in check by an Augustan wit, ironic humor and a touch of Baudelaire. Poise and wit prevail in these psalms; they give us both despair inflected by light and illumination held fast by darkness. —Erica Funkhouser, author of Earthly If we would only take the time to let one of Alfred Nicol’s poems sink in through the brilliant latticed grid of its formal exterior, how the truth of what he has to say about the human condition would hit us the way a line drive whips toward you on a dreamy summer’s afternoon, startling you back into the electric now. I love these poems because they evoke for me the zany, spiritual energy of the Beats welded as only a workman can work unwieldy things to the tempered grid of six centuries of formalism. Don’t be surprised if—after reading these poems—you find them turning back to their true subject, dear reader, which turns out to be none other than you. —Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey

Romance Language (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Romance Language (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)
Author: Amy Glynn
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2024-01-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1773491415
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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.