Able Muse Press: 55 books

Carrie Shipers’s Cause for Concern traverses a landscape of assorted disasters—such as overwork and layoffs, the ill-fated explorer, circus mishaps, nuclear disaster and radiation—but at its heart is the personal disaster of spousal illness. While a spouse might avow faith in the sentiment...

In Melissa Balmain’s Walking in on People, the serious is lightened with a generous serving of wit and humor, and the lighthearted is enriched with abundant wisdom. She shows us how poetry can be fun yet grounded in everyday challenges and triumphs, with subjects ranging from the current...

Jeredith Merrin’s third collection, Cup, deftly muses on art, travel to exotic locations, nature’s gains and losses, the resiliency of spirit juxtaposed against the body’s frailty, the joys and discords of the familial unit, and aging without bitterness and giving “Praise/ to...

Virtue, Big as Sin is impressively wide-ranging in theme and style. It illuminates everyday vignettes with solicitous spotlights such as the bereaved son sorting the contents of his father’s medicine cabinet, or the father whose son’s driver’s education recalls the time his own “unharnessed”...

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...

Maryann Corbett’s Street View is a panorama of views: suburban and urban avenues, shown in leaf and in snow; alleyways where misfits lurk in darkness, but also where “Adonis, charioteer of municipal waste collection, rides with the morning”; and boulevards of old buildings whose elegance remains...

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...

In Ellen Kaufman’s House Music, which was a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, the everyday is remade into a luminous tapestry of intricate wordplay, delightful sound effects, and transcendent moments. Her observational skill about the commonplace is revelatory, with fresh insights...

In Second Rain, Elise Hempel gleans anecdotes of uncommon poignancy from the seemingly commonplace, and crafts them into memorable poems. Family settings and the world of nature are captured and shaped into insight through the poet’s discerning eyes: here an only child in her room with...

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...

Pearl is an intricate fourteenth-century poem written by one of the greatest Middle English poets—the anonymous artist who also gave us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This medieval masterpiece presents the meditative Dream Vision of a father (the Dreamer) mourning the loss of a young daughter...

Jennifer Reeser’s Indigenous is, by turns, a celebration of her Native American heritage and a lamentation decrying the social injustice and tragedies endured. Through Reeser’s sublime craft and formal prowess, ancestral memories and spirits—both the immediate and the historical—are visited...

Maryann Corbett’s second full-length collection, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, draws on profound experience of deep winter in the lived environment, while keeping alive faith that the thaw will come and bring with it the bloom of “uncountable rows of petals.” The themes of this finalist...

  This Bed Our Bodies Shaped from April Lindner is a finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. This collection is a celebration of the universal human experience—childhood, puberty, parenthood, aging—from a uniquely personal and sensual perspective. Lindner's craft, which finds masterful...