Rhina P Espaillat

This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2020/2021 issue, Number 29. 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 2021 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 2021 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalistsEDITORIAL - Alexander PeppleFEATURED ART - A Distance Theme. FEATURED POET - Rhina P. Espaillat;(Interviewed by Deborah Warren). FICTION -Amina Lolita Gautier, Randy Nelson, Jonathan StarkeESSAYS - Michelle Cacho-Negrete, Chidiebube onye Okohia, Mark Pearce, Joachim Stanley, N. S. ThompsonBOOK REVIEWS - Travis Biddick, Brooke ClarkPOETRY - Liz Ahl, Leo Aylen, Lee Harlin Bahan, Bruce Bennett, Hilary Biehl, John J. Brugaletta, Dan Campion, Sarah Carleton, Ted Charnley, Gregory Emilio, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Stephen Gibson, D. R. Goodman, Susan McLean, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Francesco Petrarca, Estill Pollock, Erica Reid, Mary Romero, Kelly Rowe, Leona Sevick, Michael Spence, Ann M. Thompson, Will Toedtman, Toni Treadway, E. D. Watson, Gail White, Steven Withrow

The piercing meters and rhymes of Rhina P. Espaillat's collection evoke the world in sharp, etched relief-its scenes and lives, its emotions and memories.

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 ALLRhina 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, 1995-2015Rhina 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 OlivesFor 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 LanguageABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rhina P. Espaillat has published ten full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays, and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into both languages. Her national and international awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, the May Sarton Award, the Robert Frost "Tree at My Window" Prize for translation, several honors from the New England Poetry Club, the Poetry Society of America, the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College. She is a frequent reader, speaker, and workshop leader, and is active with the Powow River Poets, a literary group she cofounded in 1992.