Arts and Sciences

Description

Arts and Sciences

Poems by Allen Stein
ISBN: 978-1-963695-63-2 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-64-9 ebook $9.99

May 19, 2026

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Praise for Your Funeral is Very Important to Us by Allen Stein

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“These engaging poems brim with memories and the images that rise up from looking back: wry, rueful, often wise, and sometimes very funny.”—John Balaban

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“Stein forgoes the moral certitude and finger-pointing that characterizes so much contemporary poetry to let the imagination do its work and to remind us that we are all, finally, human. Here is a book that should be welcomed with raised glasses and huzzahs.”—Al Maginnes

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Praise for Unsettled Subjects: New Poems on Classic American Literature by Allen Stein

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“Stein wears his impressive erudition lightly, responding to these classic works with an artistic grace of the highest order. . . . Readers will never recall these canonical writers without hearing echoes from Stein’s marvelously nuanced and inventive poems.”—Timothy McBride

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“Stein . . . gives new lives to major classic writers and works in American literature. . . . This collection creates, in every sense, a New World. It is the work of a master poet.”—David Middleton

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“As he [portrays] brilliantly, and mercilessly, both vital and destructive drives visible in [these authors’] lives and their characters, they acquire added dimensions; indeed, they live anew for us.”—Catharine Savage Brosman

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And just for fun, George Drew, another of Madville’s poets with two titles, Drumming Armageddon and Just Like Oz, was inspired by Allen Stein’s new collection to write a poem of his own. He’s granted us permission to share it here:

ARTS & SCIENCES, YOU SAY?

I say so, too—like Bohr, Frisch, Rutherford, Hahn,
Einstein, Meitner, Szilard, like all the pioneers,
I, too, consider them as twined, as cosmic twins.
Take painting, Pointillism for one, all those dots.
What are they but particles, quantum’s little
darlings? Or Abstraction. Pollock, for instance,
his scattering of paint on canvases on the ground.
What is that but the same as particles,
their momentum and position not measurable
at the same time? Pollack and his paint
scattering, isn’t that Heisenberg’s Principle
in artistic action? And then there’s poetry.
Isn’t the poet much like Einstein hard
at work on the unscripted sheet of the mind?
I postulate, theoretically, that the poem is
the poet’s thought experiment made manifest,
one that sometimes turns out to be valid,
sometimes not so much. If so, like Einstein
a wrong equation, the poet scraps the poem,
the theory that is the poem, and moves on.
Arts & Sciences, yes—both the artist
and the scientist, like Einstein on his violin,
plugged in to the majestic music of the spheres.
—George Drew

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Allen Stein’s poems have been published in over thirty journals, among them The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, Willow Springs, Salmagundi, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His first poetry collection, Your Funeral is Very Important to Us, was a Semi-Finalist in the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry competition and was published in 2019 by Main Street Rag. His second collection, Unsettled Subjects:New Poems on Classic American Literature, was published in 2020 by Broadstone.

His historical novel, My Youth and Early Deaths was also published by Madville.