David Lehman

Maryann Corbett

Alexander Pepple

Stephen Kampa

Wendy Videlock

Rachel Hadas

Ned Balbo

Annie Shepherd

David M. Katz

This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2023/2024 issue, Number 31. 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). Includes the winning stories and poems from the 2023 Able Muse contest (Able Muse Write Prize) winners and finalists. ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry."-Dana Gioia. "Able Muse is refreshing to read for its selection of poetry that adheres to form . . . a quality magazine offering the reader informed and unexpected views on life."-NewPages. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2023 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple FEATURED ART - An Active Family Theme FEATURED POET - Ned Balbo; (Interviewed by Stephen Kampa) FICTION: W Goodwin, Annie Shepherd ESSAYS: Dylan Night, Roy Isen, Jean Rover BOOK REVIEWS: Brooke Clark, Maryann Corbett, Reagan Upshaw POETRY: Hilary Biehl, E. Hume Covey, Malcolm Farley, Kelly Scott Franklin, Rachel Hadas, David M. Katz, Jennifer Keith, David Lehman, Forester McClatchey, Jane McKinley, Susan McLean, Matthew Buckley Smith, Maura Stanton, N. S. Thompson, Christopher R. Vaughan, Wendy Videlock

a review of poetry, prose & art

Able Muse, Winter 2023/24 (No. 31 - print edition)

Michael P. Murphy

Jim Daniels

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Philip Metres

Pat Brisson

Joshua Hren

Kim Bridgford

Daye Phillippo

Sheryl St. Germain

Mike Aquilina

Kathleen Marks

Susan Signe Morrison

Stephen Gibson

Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

Susan L. Miller

Barbara Crooker

Paul Willis

Dean Kostos

Pablo Medina

Gail White

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Lynn Domina

Jeremiah Webster

Richard Cole

Jerry Harp

George Klawitter

C. X. Dillhunt

Julie L. Moore

Debra Bruce

James Matthew Wilson

D. S. Martin

Maryanne Hannan

Leonard Kress

Margaret Rozga

Joseph Bathanti

Richard Spilman

Tyler Farrell

Sharif Elmusa

Chelsea Martinez-Casiano

P. S. Dean

Alan Berecka

Tim Bete

Kathleen Bradley

Mary Buchinger

Roxana L. Cazan

Yuan Changming

Erica Charis-Molling

Joanna Currey

Jessica G. de Koninck

Dominic Gideon

Ed Granger

Lois Marie Harrod

Anne M. Higgins

Thomas Holahan

Siham Karami

Elaine Kehoe

Michael Angel Martin

Rhonda Miska

Robin Amelia Morris

Elizabeth Murawski

Stella Nesanovich

Matthew C. Nickel

Barry Peters

Mia Pohlman

Christopher Poore

Dennis Rhodes

Michael D. Riley

Lisa Toth Salinas

Nicholas Samaras

Janna Schledorn

Rita A. Simmonds

Sofia M. Starnes

Sophia Stid

Carole Stone

Maxine Susman

Maria Terrone

Brian Volck

Mark C. Watney

R. Bratten Weiss

Aleisa Zoecklin

Cydnee Devereaux

Jake Oresick

Mary Ladany

Juditha Dowd

Shanna Powlus Wheeler

Mia Schilling Grogan

New poems, translations, interviews, and book reviews in a yearly literary journal for Catholic Poetry.

: a Journal of Catholic Poetry

Presence

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 for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award range from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Corbett’s keen eye brings to focus uncommon detail. Her masterful technical repertoire spans received forms, metrical inventiveness, and free verse. This is poetry that amply rewards the reader with its boundless imagination, insight and visionary delight. PRAISE FOR CREDO FOR THE CHECKOUT LINE IN WINTER: The crafted poems in Maryann Corbett’s new book are vibrant. She is a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Each poem surprises. Read her poems and feel the howling snow, the mud, and the jubilance of the first warm fertile spring days. —Willis Barnstone What makes Maryann Corbett such a rare, excellent writer must be her talent for weaving together various artistic impulses, so that her poems often sound both traditional and brand new, both humorous and serious, both worldly-wise and, as John Keats once put it, “capable of being in uncertainties.” [She] remains a poet of the first order, and her poems are cause for gratitude, and deep enjoyment. —Peter Campion (from the foreword) Corbett is as comfortable and affecting within the tight confines of the Old English alliterative meter (“Cold Case”) and the Sapphic stanza (“Paint Store”) as she is with her supple blank verse and terza rima. Yet never does her rigorous craft interfere with the thoughtful, insightful content of these poems. A stunning collection, from one of America’s most gifted contemporary poets. —Marilyn L. Taylor Do not dismiss this collection as “domestic poetry,” “women’s verse.” Though grounded in seasonal rhythms and familiar settings, it is as vigorous, as reflective, as important as any man’s. Sharply visual, skillfully and cleverly crafted, her poems draw out essences, “concentrated” and persisting. “Beauty changes us,/ calling up wonder from our deepest selves/ to its right place.” —Catharine Savage Brosman These masterful poems announce themselves as winter pieces, and indeed they are so full of sleet and snow that readers may wish to dress warmly. But Corbett’s winter, a season when “dull forms come in the mail” and we eat “tasteless, stone-hard, gassed tomatoes,” is always lushly haunted by the other seasons, the way a house in one of her poems is fronted by a “three-season porch.” Corbett is one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry, and this is one of the best new collections I’ve read in years. —Geoffrey Brock

Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter: Poems

In Code was born out of Maryann Corbett’s years of work for the Minnesota Legislature, with a nonpartisan office that mandated that she maintain a public silence about politics. In poems that go from elegiac to fiery to funny, she examines behind-the-scenes legislative labor and the people who do it, the tensions of working for government in a climate hostile to government, and the buildings and grounds that put a beautiful face on a history full of ambiguities. This well-honed collection, Corbett's fifth, reflects on doublespeak and public poses; on coworkers and commutes; on legalese, courts, and elections; on news and history; and at last on retirement—through poems masterfully deployed in a dazzling array of forms: including the prose poem, the sonnet, the ghazal, the villanelle, and the canzone. Maryann Corbett is a candid, wistful, purposeful, and meditative poet in command of her craft. Of her years working for the Minnesota Legislature, Maryann Corbett writes in Rattle: "There was the frisson supplied by the constant presence of the media, the satisfaction of believing one's work served the public, the thrill of working with smart, motivated people, the pleasure of being surrounded by the striking buildings and gardens of the Capitol grounds, the sense of history. There was also the uncomfortable awareness that with every legislative session there are winners and losers, and that the same battles for justice are fought, and often lost, by the same people, year after year." In Code features poems that reflect on both those pleasures and that discomfort, as in these lines from "Seven Little Poems about Making Laws": Capitol café: German proverbs, whitewashed since 1917, are restored to view with bright applause. Old hatreds have new objects now. PRAISE FOR MARYANN CORBETT: Ned Balbo: . . . an extraordinary poet. Tony Barnstone: . . . metrical poetry infused with gorgeous imagery and the vernacular of our scientized world. Richard Wilbur: . . . accurate and delightful. Rhina P. Espaillat: . . . every section touches me and keeps calling me back. A.M. Juster: . . . wit without meanness, warmth without sentimentality, and craft without pretension. Geoffrey Brock: . . . one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry. Marilyn Taylor: . . . poignant, perceptive, exquisitely formed poems . . . a poet to be genuinely grateful for. Peter Campion: . . . a poet of the first order. Willis Barnstone: . . . a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Susan McLean: . . . a stunner. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English in 1981, with a specialization in medieval literature and linguistics. She expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She is the author of five books of poetry and is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her work is widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

Poems

In Code

Heinrich Heine

Amit Majmudar

Joanna Pearson

Matthew Buckley Smith

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2018 issue, Number 26. 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. "Able Muse is refreshing to read for its selection of poetry that adheres to form . . . a quality magazine offering the reader informed and unexpected views on life."—NewPages. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2018 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ART - A Couples theme. FEATURED POET - Matthew Buckley Smith; (Interviewed by Joanna Pearson). FICTION - Anthony J. Otten, Claudette E. Sutton. ESSAYS - Stella Pye, Michael Cohen, Sam Aaron Morgan. BOOK REVIEWS - Brooke Clark. POETRY - Amit Majmudar, Gabriel Spera, Lynn Marie Houston, Maryann Corbett, D. R. Goodman, Heinrich Heine, Terese Coe, Andrew Firsardi, Alexis Sears, Ann M. Thompson, Melissa Cannon, David Allen Sullivan, Rob Wright.

Able Muse, Winter 2018 (No. 26 - print edition)

Maryann Corbett

Books

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