Strange Borderlands, Ben Berman’s first full-length collection, counterpoises insights with uncertainties while chronicling the poet's immersion in a new culture. In compelling metrical, free verse and prose poems, Berman provides a vivid narrative of exotic adventures, especially his Peace Corps service in Zimbabwe—the people, the land, and his “struggling with the blurred lines of where things end” on his return home. This distinctive collection can go from humorous to heartbreaking, and is spellbinding from start to finish—a rare achievement. PRAISE FOR STRANGE BORDERLANDS: Ben Berman’s wonderful first book, Strange Borderlands, is a masterful study in the power and limits of empathy, of respect for difference in tension with the urgent need for common ground. Beyond his formal and stylistic range, linguistic flexibility, eye for detail, irrepressible wit and powerful feeling, what’s most impressive about this terrific book is Berman’s inclusive generous spirit, the deadly serious imaginative play he exercises in every line of every poem. This is a book to cherish. —Alan Shapiro These are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism, a word so overused it is often flattened out to a platitude or piety. But not in this book. —Fred Marchant (from the “Foreword”) Ben Berman’s lyric poems set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life: the hammer striking the sheep’s head, the sustenance that follows; disciplinary beatings that students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade. Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty. I believe every word in this collection. This is an unforgettable debut by a powerful and humble voice. —Dzvinia Orlowsky Ben Berman’s marvelous first book, Strange Borderlands, chronicles in startling and unforgettable poems his sojourn in Zimbabwe and his immersion in a culture that both embraces and exiles him, attracts and reproaches, changing him forever. Using a variety of poetic approaches—rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free verse—he gives us a multi-tonal description of landscapes that are as elusive as they are inviting, as unfamiliar to most of us as they are intuitively recognizable. This is a compelling poetry of “strange borderlands where distance and intimacy collide.” —Gregory Djanikian

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Edited by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pèrez and Norma Cantú. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experiences growing up near the U.S./Mexico border, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA remaps our understanding of borders as psychic, social, and cultural terrains that we inhabit and that inhabit us all. Drawing heavily on archival research and a comprehensive literature review while contextualizing the book within her theories and writings before and after its 1987 publication, this critical edition elucidates Anzaldúa's complex composition process and its centrality in the development of her philosophy. It opens with two introductory studies; offers a corrected text, explanatory footnotes, translations, and four archival appendices; and closes with an updated bibliography of Anzaldúa's works, an extensive scholarly bibliography on Borderlands, a brief biography, and a short discussion of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers. "Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pèrez's meticulous archival work and Norma Elia Cantú's life experience and expertise converge to offer a stunning resource for Anzaldúa scholars; for writers, artists, and activists inspired by her work; and for everyone. Hereafter, no study of Borderlands will be complete without this beautiful, essential reference."--Paola Bacchetta

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

Martin McGovern’s Bad Fame muses on the perplexities and certainties of the human condition, often in soaring eulogies and searing elegies: as in “The Circle of Late Afternoon” which asks, “Isn’t there an art to giving myself away slowly like wheat opening to the sun?”; or, “Processionalia,” where “a bee/ abandons the tea roses/ and circle that black blossom of/ the widow’s veiled face as if her tears were/ pollen and the bee could feather/ its legs with grief.” Be it lore set in Colorado, or farther out, the personal and regional tributes unravel the universally familiar and pertinent. McGovern's debut collection is the work of a seasoned master in command of craft and themes. PRAISE FOR BAD FAME: Martin McGovern’s long-awaited, well-constructed first book gives itself away slowly, artfully. It is carefully considered, quietly passionate, and deeply humane. —Edward Hirsch There is an unforsaken paradise in these pages, and a lot of ungodly anxiety. . . . Like Dubliners, Bad Fame darkens, deepens, darkens through its sections, understanding with Joyce the tidal pull of place that will never let us survive if we resist the current . . . the “blue snow,” not of Dublin, but of memory, of Colorado . . . this extraordinarily unique McGovern flair for the Keatonish (Buster) aside mixed with lyrical intellection, these poetic rooms with their many blue lights, direct or indirect, for us to turn on as night comes on. —David Lazar (from the foreword) Here are exacting sentences, any number irregularly hugged into the ferocious clusters which are Mr. McGovern’s poems. My likely favorite, “If the Light Could Kill Us,” does heavy duty as a garden unfurled at dawn, the beloved “still sleeping,/ flame-pink welts our love leaves on your almost/ too delicate skin, brazen in this light.” And then the assault of a very different sentence, “Samuel Johnson is dead. And Mrs. Thrale./ And the kind cherub of a straitjacket/ she kept closeted should reason fail/ him thoroughly, where’s that deck-coat now?” followed by other people’s torments inspected so closely that this morning “violence/ lingers like the last touch of a season.” Hence: “Only as I rise to pull the window’s shade/ do you wake, dusted and dazed, as from a fever.” Strong as they are, the sentences, like the centuries, are treated pitilessly, as you can hear, yet there is what the poet calls “the shimmer of a teen movie” throughout. Resilient art, and no loitering. —Richard Howard

In The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, multi-award winning illustrator and graphic novelist James Kochalka brings us a thematic collection of drawings that chronicle the exploits of a worm who embarks on an adventure of rescue, fueled by inescapable surges of bravery. This odyssey is aptly and expertly versified into an ekphrastic epic by former Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea. Readers of all ages will be entertained by the sights, tension, suspense, and humor of this unique collection. Yet here’s a leaf! And here’s a boat! And here’s the cure for the chill of doubt! Why should not hope, however odd, Be just as strong, no, stronger than gods? ABOUT THE AUTHORS: James Kochalka is the author and illustrator of more than forty graphic novels. He has won two Eisner Awards, one Harvey Award, and four Ignatz Awards. In 2011 he was named the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont. He also has a separate career as a rock star, performing with his band James Kochalka Superstar. In 2007, Rolling Stone named his song “Britney’s Silver Can” one of the 100 Best Songs of the year. Sydney Lea, founding editor of New England Review, is author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Here (Four Way Books, 2019). A former Vermont Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer finalist, he has also published a novel, a collection of literary criticism, and four volumes of personal essays.

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

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 on such wide-ranging subjects as construction work, native and exotic flora and fauna, a sewing machine and a piano handed down through generations, and a momentous visit to the doctor’s office. House Music is a wonderful debut collection from a uniquely inspired poet. PRAISE FOR HOUSE MUSIC: Ellen Kaufman is a master of sight; her explorations encourage us to see the ordinary beauty in homely scenes. Equally important for any poet worth her salt, she is also a master of sounds. She fills her poems with mouth-watering phrases like “dollops/ and fillips of tulips,” and delicious appreciations of domestic details. Her sly and understated villanelle, “A Flemish Still Life,” epitomizes Kaufman’s ars poetica as well as her observational skill. “No effort’s wasted if you aim to please,” it begins. It ends with the gentle command “Aim to please.” Kaufman and her poems aim to please, and succeed in doing so. —Willard Spiegelman I’ve been reading Ellen Kaufman’s poetry for many years now. There’s no other experience quite like it. Her language is taut and her aim unerring: her poems fly straight and true. Part of this has to do with technical mastery. She is a virtuoso of meter and rhyme, and her deep understanding of how structure works in a sonnet or a villanelle, for example, results in poems that combine pattern or repetition with an astonishingly singular vision. —Jennifer Barber (from the foreword) The intelligence behind Ellen Kaufman’s wonderfully realized House Music is poised and observant, its reflections unfolding in sinuous sentences that are effortlessly elegant and deceptively plainspoken. The subjects and themes of her poems are various—the family romance, an encounter with a panhandler, the first moon landing—often taking the form of enigmatic vignettes and fables like “Sonatina” and “Thirteenth Night,” pervaded by a sense of the fragile contingency of life. House Music is a brilliant and powerful debut. —John Koethe Ellen Kaufman’s distinguished poems achieve their purposes by modulating a powerful self-containment, a powerful and wise human awareness, by means of a chorus of exquisite and luxurious local effects. They are astonishing acts of balance, intelligence, precision, eloquence, vision, imagination, and grace. —Vijay Seshadri

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 the discerning lover of poetry. PRAISE FOR HEAVEN FROM STEAM: Carol Light’s Heaven from Steam is an extraordinary book, formally adept and wonderfully inventive. Light is a poet of arresting images and stunning sound effects; she needs just a few short lines to make even the old symbol of a sunrise worth our attention (“Pink lamé sundogs/ bodyguard/ the bigwig’s dazzled rise”). However perfect her details, though, and however sublime her phrases, it’s Light’s restless intelligence that keeps me returning to her work. Here’s a poet who inhabits, rather than frames the world; a poet of gestures, whose mind and heart are in motion, whether it’s a shrugged shoulder, or rolled eyes, or an open-armed embrace. Heaven from Steam is a thrilling debut. —Jason Whitmarsh The book is marked by a lightness of touch. The overall effect is playful. . . . But she strikes another tone entirely in the crowning sonnet sequence, “Vicolo del Divino Amore” . . . the nimbleness with which she weaves and unweaves her lines and imagery around the birth of a yearned-for child. —Brad Leithauser (from the foreword) In one of his “Dream Song” poems, John Berryman writes, “The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once.” Carol Light, in Heaven from Steam, performs arias again and again; her songs are equal parts rapturous (“the sun ignites the lantern world”) and disquieting (“billboards blaze/ the end of days”). She takes up the Etruscan dead and the soon-to-be-living (“my one wish kicked/ and stitched herself into the world”), and she does so in lines that are musical and moving and often quite funny. She makes a magnificent debut. Upon finishing the book, readers will demand (like Goethe on his deathbed), “More Light!” — Cody Walker Although these poems span landscapes from the Pacific Northwest to Italy, their true settings are interior, the complex terrain of an acutely observant and questioning mind. At times playful, at times philosophical, at times filled with longing, they take us past gulls and bell buoys, cathedrals and cobblestone piazzas, to the mysteries that surround us—and they do it all with stunning formal dexterity. Heaven from Steam marks the debut of a vivid poet already at ease with her art. —Linda Bierds

Stephen Scaer’s Pumpkin Chucking is a harvest of wit and enlightenment, gleaned from everyday situations. Scaer shows impressive formal dexterity, and inventive use of nonce and received forms—sonnet, double-dactyl, Old-English-style alliterative meter; he turns the limerick on its head as it transforms into a humor-laden meditative tool in sequences such as “Mid-Life Limericks” and “Classical Limericks.” Scaer’s delivery is immediate, simple but never simplistic, laying bare the human condition to reveal that “The triumphs that [we] seek/ are held for their own sake,/ and shower us with grace/ like petals on the grass.” This finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award is a rare achievement in its deft marriage of the lighthearted and sublime. It is a book to relish from start to finish. PRAISE FOR PUMPKIN CHUCKING: Right from the opening sonnet in Pumpkin Chucking, the poignant “Hannah at Ten,” you’ll recognize Scaer as an outstanding lyric poet. But the prevailing voice in this collection belongs to a hugely entertaining, middle-aged, middle-class Everyman writing about the everyday. Take the lifeguard, sung in Old-English-style alliterative meter—“whistle-whirler,” “Thane of the Poconos.” Or the Hercules who can divert rivers into Augean stables with no hassles from the EPA. (And both of these pale compared to Scaer’s “Classical Limericks.”) Some of the poems are exquisitely lyrical: “Light Box,” “Raspberry Patch,” “Long Trail.” Still, what you take away from the book is Scaer’s deadpan humor—a wit that’s wicked but not mean. Often as not, the speaker is himself the target. And the more the guy makes fun of himself, the more we love him. He speaks for us all. —Deborah Warren Stephen Scaer’s Pumpkin Chucking celebrates the New England landscape while still being universal . . . and it surprises us with wit in the winking way of Frost. —A.M. Juster (from the foreword) A collection with a range of forms as broad as Stephen Scaer’s Pumpkin Chucking can read like an exercise book—or like a tour of the expressive possibilities of all of English poetry. This book is decisively the latter. From the delightful “Mid-Life Limericks” to the modern idiom shaped to Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in “Wendell,” each poem feels utterly natural, utterly native to the form. And don’t miss “Sarcasm,” a sonnet that deftly recasts Petrarch’s jewels of transcendent love as stones that wound both lover and beloved. —Richard Wakefield This is a wonderful and entertaining book of poetry. Stephen Scaer’s poems are full of wit, sarcasm and humor. His subjects are familiar to many of us: parenting, tedious jobs, home repair, dealing with middle age. But his well-crafted verse—the rhymes alone are worth the price of admission—is much more than that. Reading the poems, I was reminded of the voice of Screwtape dispensing advice to his devil-in-training nephew in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters: the humor is aimed directly at that familiar reflection in the mirror. When I was done reading and admiring these poems, I was left feeling like the narrator standing by his grill smoking a rack of ribs in Scaer’s “The Sacrifice of Cain”: “I wish I were a better man.” —Robert Crawford

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” Mustang went “bungeeing” around a bend; it celebrates the artist’s creative highs, or reflects on the misfortunate who is forever nearing the threshold of achievement, aware that life may prove a “most inept librettist” and should thus be paired with our “strongest song.” Osen’s dexterity with both formal and free verse is apparent. His wit and humor prevent the serious from becoming ponderous while his intelligent insight lends depth to the lighthearted. Reading and rereading this outstanding debut collection, it is easy to see why—from the first poem to the last—it is a worthy winner of the 2012 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR VIRTUE, BIG AS SIN: Frank Osen’s Virtue, Big as Sin offers one witty, elegant poem after another. The rhymes are especially clever, the meter sure, the stanzas well-shaped, but this poet’s sense of proportion is also reflected in wisdom (and what is wisdom but a sense of proportion?). An urbane maker of sparkling phrases like “that genuine Ur of the ersatz,” Osen can also write plainly, movingly, about a young girl’s funeral. And he reflects often on art itself, which he so rightly calls “the conjured awe.” —Mary Jo Salter (Judge, 2012 Able Muse Book Award) In his talent for tragedy and comedy, and for mixing them, Osen takes his place in a distinguished line of English-language poets that runs from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our day. —Timothy Steele (from the afterword) Reading Virtue, Big as Sin has left me with the sense of satisfaction and enduring pleasure that really good poetry always produces, even when it also does the rest of what honest writing may do: confirm suspicions about ourselves we wish we could refute, bring to mind aspects of nature we’d rather forget, and deliver alarming news about the future, both public and private. Frank Osen does all of this and much more, all with grace and wit, in language that makes the messenger thoroughly “one of us.” —Rhina P. Espaillat Frank Osen’s poems revel in beauty and pleasure, in technical dexterity and high-gloss finish. Readers who care about such things will be abundantly rewarded. But the reveling is haunted by loss, awful possibilities of failure, a nothingness glimpsed beneath the carnival. One of Osen’s avowed tutelary spirits is Wallace Stevens, and his probing of his subjects can often seem like an extended, heart-wrenching commentary on Stevens’s line, “Death is the mother of Beauty.” The fragility of beauty, the omnipresence of death, and the intimate connections between them, are everywhere present in these marvelously heartening and effective poems. —Dick Davis