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David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound His declaration that “Earth’s everything I am” runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding. Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular.
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Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist. I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a book both of witness and warning. These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there. What’s left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this. Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream. The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur. This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things.
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Cordeiro’s vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer. Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations. Will Cordeiro’s Trap Street travels a shifting landscape. Full-length collection of original poetry from Will Cordeiro, now available for pre-order from Able Muse Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Foyles, and other online