Taking Shape - carmina figurata

Taking Shape - carmina figurata
Author: Jan D. Hodge
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2015-08-31
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409578
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An eclectic mix of shapes and subjects populate Taking Shape—Jan D. Hodge’s full-length collection of carmina figurata (sometimes called shaped poems, pattern poetry, or figure poems). Hodge’s many masterpieces include depictions of a saxophone, a Madonna and Child, a combination piano/guillotine, and other silhouettes of amazing difficulty and detail. These poems are not only visually stunning, they are also sonically beautiful, and retain a transcendent freedom while conforming to both illustrative and metrical constraints. Taking Shape is a visual feast of inspired poetry. PRAISE FOR TAKING SHAPE: Are not all printed formal poems shaped poems? The sonnet, the hymn, the sestina, and the ghazal all have characteristic shapes rather like boxes that confine their subjects. In Jan D. Hodge’s Taking Shape the subjects have burst from their cages and confront us immediately with what they are. Then the words they are made of can reveal their inner beings. The long closure of “Spring” describes the best way to read these poems. I have long known what prayer is, but I never knew what one looked like until I read “Madonna and Child.” — Fred Chappell, author of The Fred Chappell Reader Here is a perfect matching of shapes and poetry. Through a wide-ranging array of subjects and tones, Hodge’s mastery of language within such challenging constraints is truly impressive. Syntax and rhythm, metaphor and symbol (see for instance “The One That Got Away” or “The Lesson of the Snow”), conversational snippets and quatrains, are surprisingly nuanced. Even the occasional poems—wedding, elegy, Valentine’s day, Halloween, Christmas, an early morning poetry reading—find new things to say and striking ways to say them. These poems reward reading again and again. — Robert J. Conley, author of Mountain Windsong Jan D. Hodge is the master par excellence of carmina figurata. In Taking Shape you’ll see such word-pictures as the Chinese ideogram for spring; a harpsichord poised before a guillotine; a still life with quill pen and ink bottle, T-square and drafting triangle. More amazing still, Hodge forms many of the intricate images with metered language—in one case in medieval alliterative verse! In a poem about baseball Hodge writes, “forgiveness/ is the best/ we dare hope for in this bruised world/ the thinnest/ chance that lets us somehow/ slide home free”; here “only by grace . . . can we be safe.” Hodge knows of grace, his poems are full of grace, and Taking Shape, like grace itself, is a gift of utter beauty. — Vince Gotera, Editor, North American Review

Naked for Tea

Naked for Tea
Author: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2018-07-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1773490176
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Naked for Tea, a finalist in the Able Muse Book Award, is a uniquely uplifting and inspirational collection. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poems are at times humorously surreal, at times touchingly real, as they explore the ways in which our own brokenness can open us to new possibilities in a beautifully imperfect world. Naked for Teaproves that poems that are disarmingly witty on the surface can have surprising depths of wisdom. This is a collection not to be missed. PRAISE FOR NAKED FOR TEA Most anyone can make lemonade out of lemons. However, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s welcoming voice, receptive heart, artistic mastery, and empathic vision become an alchemy of being. Out of mudslides, misunderstandings, the exploits of Wild Rose, deep loss, and chocolate cake that sinks in the center, she makes courage, care, joy, and compassion. When “what’s the use” breaks down the back door, she is there, her great good soul encouraging us to sigh, laugh, renew our attention, and feel grateful for and delighted by any cake that sinks in the center. — Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch Heart-thawingly honest, deliriously sexy, and compassionate down to the fingertips. A book of kindness and bewilderment and delight from one of our best poets. — Teddy Macker, author of This World There is still rich ore in the Colorado San Juans. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a treasure. In an era of seeming nonstop, subject-matterless, first person mirror dancing at the Temple of Narcissus incomprehension, it is a delight to find a poet who can tell a crackling story laced with gorgeous imagery and euphony that will appeal to the ancient seats of learning: the heart, belly, and brain. These are poems Sappho and Horace would love: they delight and instruct. They can be read and sung, and they will echo from the proverbial Colorado mountaintops through the archetypal red rock canyons of your mind. Prepare thyself to be smitten and to fall in love. — David Lee, Utah State Poet Laureate emeritus, author of Last Call and A Legacy of Shadows Reading Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is to float upon a never-ending waterfall of wonder . . . Pay attention. The elegance of her simplicity will blind you to her mastery. Then, she will let you fall, head over heels, in Love. With everything. — Wayne Muller (from the foreword), author of Sabbath and Legacy of the Heart

Able Muse, Winter 2016 (No. 22 - print edition)

Able Muse, Winter 2016 (No. 22 - print edition)
Author: Alexander Pepple
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2016-12-04
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1927409810
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This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2016 issue, Number 22. 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 Museprint 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 2016 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Mitch Dobrowner; (Interviewed by Sharon Passmore). FEATURED POET - Bill Coyle; (Interviewed by Ernest Hilbert). FICTION - Erika Warmbrunn, Cameron MacKenzie, Vicky Mlyniec. ESSAYS - Gerry Cambridge. BOOK REVIEWS - Amit Majmudar, Brooke Clark. POETRY - Amit Majmudar, Len Krisak, Scott Ruescher, Timothy Murphy, Cody Walker, Christine de Pizan, Håkan Sandell, Anna M. Evans, Feng Zhi, Tony Barnstone, Liz Ahl, Susan McLean, Elise Hempel, Siham Karami, Maryann Corbett, Fran Markover, Colleen Carias, Julie Steiner, Elizabeth Wager, Clare Jones.

And after All

And after All
Author: Rhina P. Espaillat
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2019-04-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1773490192
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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 the loss of loved ones and loved things of the world, but their extraordinary empathy and gentle wit keep them from becoming depressing or sentimental. Savor this book and share it with people you love. —A. M. Juster, author of Sleaze & Slander: New and Selected Comic Verse, 1995–2015 Rhina P. Espaillat, more than any living poet in English, gives ordinary language the glow of the sacred. Workaday words, trite with custom like thin coins, accrue new resonance and weight; plain objects are haloed with aureoles like figures in gold mosaics. Saints with their visions used to do this: wave away the veils that separate our shallow perceptions from a deeper reality. But not everyone is granted visions. How much harder it is to use the same words we all use and misuse, the same objects we all touch and ignore, common experiences we dismiss, and, by using words with precision, using the serendipity of rhyme, and the convention of metrical patterns, to give the reader the experience of revelation. Craft is not the opposite of inspiration, Espaillat reminds us, it is the only way to it. —A. E. Stallings, author of Olives For most of its poems And After All is, as the title indicates, deeply elegiac in tone. There are many poignant evocations of the past in the book, rich with quotidian surface detail but always suffused with undemonstrative but palpably real emotion. A poem about the poet’s grandmother, a tough no-nonsense farmer’s wife who described how cows inarticulately but unmistakably grieved when they realized their calves were to be slaughtered, ends with the line, “She told it simply, but she faltered there.” In its quiet pathos the line seems to sum up much of the book; exactness, no fuss, unforced fidelity to the anecdote, but the tremor of poignant empathy always present. A very eloquent collection of beautifully crafted poems, and one that it is hard to read dry-eyed. —Dick Davis, author of Love in Another Language

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.

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.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author: John Ridland
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2016-08-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1927409772
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the anonymous Gawain-Poet (or Pearl-Poet) is, like Beowulf, one of the greatest classics of English literature. Hailed as the finest Arthurian romance, this technically brilliant tale of enchantment, faith, temptation, and chivalry is tautly constructed, with a wonderfully rich vocabulary and vivid language that blends sophisticated atmosphere with psychological depth. John Ridland’s new Modern English translation, unlike most presentations, is complete, covering every passage and word of the Middle English, Northwest Midland dialect original with the same line numbering, contents and meaning. His is the only version written in a familiar modern meter—pleasurable to modern ears, yet retaining the spirit of repetition and alliteration of the medieval original. And Dr. Ridland’s introduction and notes are enlightening. This translation is a must-have for unlocking all the pleasures and delights of the original classic. PRAISE FOR JOHN RIDLAND’S TRANSLATION: With his loving rendition of a great classic into vigorous metrical lines, John Ridland has given Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a fresh lease on life. I’ve seen several other versions of this masterpiece, but none so engagingly readable as Ridland’s. His preface, too, is useful and illuminating. Here is a book to enjoy right now and to cherish forever. —X.J. Kennedy John Ridland gives us a recognizably English Gawain, and a very pleasurable one at that. The language is ours. It is slightly elevated, as befits a work so finely crafted, but only enough to demand our attention. Originally written in the same alliterative verse as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was archaic in its own day; now, over six-hundred years later, alliterative verse can be as inaccessible as the pentatonic harp tunes that apparently accompanied it. Ridland gives the poem a long, loose line that sings in the lyrical passages, creeps in the spooky ones, and cavorts in the comic ones. Just as important, the densely mythic ethos, fully intact, enriches every word. —Richard Wakefield Panoramas of banqueting and hunting, closely observed rituals of dressing, arming, and game preparation, and rich descriptions of landscape and weather—Ridland’s translation presents these in all their delightful, over-the-top particularity. —Maryann Corbett (from the foreword) The language in which the consummate poet and translator John Ridland serves up this delicious story in verse is exactly what it deserves. The descriptions are exuberant, the narrative flows and exhilarates like the wine at the courts we’re asked to imagine, and the exchanges between complex characters so subtly flavored by intelligent diplomacy that it makes the dialogue of much current fiction seem, by contrast, like a six-pack on the front stoop. Read this book. I suspect that, like all enchantments, it shifts and assumes different forms to different eyes. But I do guarantee surprises, and inexhaustible delight. —Rhina P. Espaillat

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)
Author: Emily Leithauser
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2016-07-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1927409683
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In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser transforms keenly felt experience and bittersweet memories into poems of impressive craftsmanship. She deftly muses on the dichotomies of, among other things, childhood and growing up, the headiness of love gained and the pangs of love lost, the joys of the nuclear family and the trials when it gets broken up. Although a first book, The Borrowed World is the seasoned work of poet of abundant talent coming into her powers and deservedly, the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR THE BORROWED WORLD: In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser’s formal mastery—her consummate knack for writing lines and sentences as crisp and elegant as the Edo prints to which she pays homage—entwines with the sheer immediacy and vulnerability of the poet’s voice. Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major talent. —Peter Campion, 2015 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of El Dorado Emily Leithauser’s first collection, The Borrowed World, is an elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss, familial relations—with all the devastating implosions within—and our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning debut. —Natasha Trethewey, 2012–2014 US Poet Laureate, author of Thrall If her intensely accurate perceptions of the physical world and the beautiful forms in which she sets those perceptions were all that Emily Leithauser gave us in these poems, they would be more than enough to satisfy the hungriest poetry reader. But step by perspicuous step, in poem after poem, she enlarges and encompasses, she broadens and deepens and transmutes perception into feeling, feeling into thought, and thought into revelation. —Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of 3 Sections Love poems, family poems, narrative poems: The Borrowed World is a moving and memorable debut which covers a lot of ground but is always rooted in actualities. The poems are very well-made, too, but their equally great distinction is to be well-felt—subtle in their account of the observing “I,” and simultaneously generous and shrewd in their understanding of others. Page by page, they create a series of powerful cameos; taken as a whole, their larger purpose emerges: to register what can be known and (especially) not known about our lives as individuals, and to value what time allows us to enjoy on earth, while admitting the brevity of our stay here. —Andrew Motion, 1999–2009 UK Poet Laureate, author of The Customs House I have read The Borrowed World several times, and each time I find more in it to be delighted and touched by. Emily Leithauser’s art waits for you, and I am sure that you will be as pleased and moved by it as I have been. —Michael Palma (from the foreword), author of Begin in Gladness

Double-Parked, with Tosca

Double-Parked, with Tosca
Author: Ellen Kaufman
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2021-05-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1773490672
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Ellen Kaufman's Double-Parked, with Tosca navigates the natural and the manmade-often with an eye on their strained juxtaposition-or unravels the complex dynamics of the physical, social, and political. Kaufman can go from elegizing an Elizabethan old dress past to the environmentally conscious "now [when] the polar caps / undress themselves." She weaves the history of early settlements and their challenges and triumphs over the sometime inhospitable land; or negotiates the melding and mismatch of cultures in her native New York City. Kaufman's poems assert their claim inside violence, indifference, and exclusion. This surefooted second collection is a fitting special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR DOUBLE-PARKED, WITH TOSCA Ellen Kaufman's poems pierce the reader the way a needle pierces fabric. With a stunningly precise apprehension of the real, she stitches immigration histories and the intimacies of family life, cityscapes and suburban developments, the recent past and the perilous future. She has the power to shapeshift, too, so that we experience, as if from inside, the hidden life of a retired battleship, an algae bloom, a bird nesting in a traffic light. Marked by grief, endurance, and the truths of beauty made manifest, these are essential poems. - Jennifer Barber, author of Works on Paper Ellen Kaufman's absolutely terrific second book can fearlessly slash through pretext, but also cohere unlikely pairs through the X-ray delicacy of an ace metaphorist. She can use "he wanted to get laid" as a refrain in a satisfyingly avenging villanelle, and also see how a beret looks like a "fluffy flounder," and a chandelier handed down through generations "rattles like a skeleton." A tick can alternate stanzas with its host, and an orchestra can create a landscape from its instruments. Kaufman uses form-including a masterful crown of sonnets about her father's end of life-and the speaker herself takes form in persona poems of NYC landmarks; of the USS Intrepid, she writes, "the old moon / shuttle Discovery perches / like an aphid on a rose leaf." I bet you never heard that before! And so you will feel about this whole body of poems. Kaufman's wit, her craft, her vision-this book celebrates their collaboration. - Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone As a young person, the best poem I ever read in my life was a Petrarchan sonnet by Ellen Kaufman-before I even knew what a Petrarchan sonnet was. Now, in reading Ellen Kaufman's newest book, Double-Parked, with Tosca, I immediately see everything I want poetry to be: imaginative, evocative, observant, musical, filled with sound and living breath, and brilliant. I can't recommend this book and this author enough. - Nicholas Samaras, author of American Psalm, World Psalm ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ellen Kaufman's first collection, House Music, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award (Able Muse, 2013). A poem from that book won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize awarded by Southwest Review, where it also appeared. Her poems have also been published by Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Shenandoah, the Yale Review, and other literary magazines. Twice a MacDowell Fellow (2009 and 2013), she holds an AB from Cornell, and MFA and MSLS degrees from Columbia University. Formerly a poetry reviewer for Library Journal, she now reviews for Publishers Weekly. She lives near Straus Park in upper Manhattan.

Trap Street (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Trap Street (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)
Author: Will Cordeiro
Publisher: Able Muse Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1773490583
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Will Cordeiro's Trap Street travels a shifting landscape. Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations. Cordeiro's vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer. This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things. PRAISE FOR TRAP STREET The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur. Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream. What's left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this. These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there. I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a book both of witness and warning. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist. Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular. His declaration that "Earth's everything I am" runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding. -David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound "Not everything must have some cosmic meaning." That is the sort of red-wheelbarrow faith Will Cordeiro depends on as his adventurous eye records the variegated appearance of the natural and manmade world, no detail too small to merit commemoration. The scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus cited the "haecceitas" ("this-ness") of observed experience as one component in the quest for the divine, so there is every reason to regard Cordeiro's poems as bridging the gap between life's overlooked detritus and exalted vision itself. And visual acuity here is matched by a strenuous verbality, color-coordinated vowels informing chewable consonants in a lexicon ranging from "cattywampus" to "glumes" to "blear." It's a pied-beauty diction and syntax that remind me of Hopkins and Marianne Moore. We should all join in welcoming Will Cordeiro's amazing debut. -Alfred Corn, author of The Poem's Heartbeat ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Will Cordeiro has work published in Agni, Best New Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Offing, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer's Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. Will received an MFA and PhD from Cornell University. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Currently, Will lives in Flagstaff and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.