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

Poetry. 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. "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 "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 "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"

"Struggling to raise her little brother Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star-gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery"--

With his dark wit and corrosive dialogue, Eric Bogosian tells a powerful and emotionally wrenching tale of two lovers who form a mesmerizing and destructive bond while trying to evade the looming failure of their respective lives. Reba runs away from her shabby and desolate rural community for the lure of New York City. Her tall and awkward frame lands her work modeling, but she is not prepared for the glamorous, drug-fueled life of a celebrated mannequin. After a series of painful relationships, she sees hope and an exit toward stability and sanity in the man who saves her brother's life. This man is Rick, a successful SoHo general practitioner with a warm family and an idyllic life that has left him restless and hollow. He doesn't take Reba seriously until he finds himself so enmeshed in her beauty that he risks losing everything--his home, his children and his beloved wife. Master monologist and author of the acclaimed Mall returns with a sprawling novel of urban desperation and desire that brings to mind the winding narratives of Tom Wolfe salted with the dark urges of Philip Roth. Wasted Beauty is Bogosian's enthralling journey through the high life of drugs and fashion celebrity, middle-class guilt and sexual obsession.

In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life’s work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments. At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.

Deals with the issues of global warming and climate change: What are the sickening secrets of gruesome greenhouse gases? Which is the deadliest toxic waste? Will the Earth make it to the year 2100? Find out in this book!

“A sharp and unconventional book — a swirl of memoir, travelogue and biography of some of history's champion day-dreamers.” —Maureen Corrigan, "Fresh Air" A spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of "retirement" in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne--the hero of this book--who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay. Hampl's own life winds through these pilgrimages, from childhood days lazing under a neighbor's beechnut tree, to a fascination with monastic life, and then to love--and the loss of that love which forms this book's silver thread of inquiry. Finally, a remembered journey down the Mississippi near home in an old cabin cruiser with her husband turns out, after all her international quests, to be the great adventure of her life. The real job of being human, Hampl finds, is getting lost in thought, something only leisure can provide. The Art of the Wasted Day is a compelling celebration of the purpose and appeal of letting go.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2015 issue, Number 19. 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: EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Wayne Levin; (Interviewed by Sharon Passmore). FEATURED POET - Eric McHenry; (Interviewed by Cody Walker). FICTION - Linda Boroff, Richard Dokey, Michael Bradburn-Ruster, Zara Lisbon, Lane Kareska. ESSAYS - Catharine Savage Brosman, Kevin Durkin, Robert Earle, Eric Torgersen. BOOK REVIEWS - Reagan Upshaw. POETRY - Jay Rogoff, Meredith McCann, William Baer, Jan D. Hodge, Stephen Scaer, William Thompson, Martial, Susan McLean, Carrie Shipers, Maura Stanton, Stephen Gibson, Len Krisak, Glenn Freeman, Richard Cecil, Bruce Bennett, Julie Steiner, Eric Torgersen, Ed Shacklee.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2015 issue, Number 20. 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 2015 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION — Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL — Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST — Léon Leijdekkers. FEATURED POET — Amit Majmudar; (Interviewed by Daniel Brown). FICTION — Paul Soto, Lynda Sexson, Andrea Witzke Slot. ESSAYS — N.S. Thompson, Moira Egan. BOOK REVIEWS — Stephen Kampa, Robert B. Shaw. POETRY — X.J. Kennedy, Wendy Videlock, Kim Bridgford, Peter Kline, Catharine Savage Brosman, Terese Coe, Steven Winn, Jay Udall, Beth Houston, Jennifer Reeser, Leslie Schultz, Ryan Wilson, Max Gutmann, Freeman Rogers, Dan Campion, Brooke Clark, David Stephenson, Autumn Newman, James Matthew Wilson, Athar C. Pavis, Jeanne Wagner, Elise Hempel.

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