New England Review

New Books from NER Authors

April 2020

Independent bookstores need us now more than ever. Support them from home by purchasing these titles and others from bookshop.org.

“Deep Gossip is beautiful and true, and alive with love, as life itself. The magnificence of Sidney Wade’s vision is unmatched in American Poetry.” —Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems 

From the publisher: Throughout her seven critically acclaimed collections, Sidney Wade has established herself as a poet with a serious but light touch, capable of the clarity and inventiveness it takes to work a problem to both pleasure and resolution.  Inspired by landscape, language, music, and living things, as well as the occasional bout of political outrage, Deep Gossip is a smart collection.

Sidney Wade is a poet, translator, and professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Florida. She is the author of seven collections of poetry: Bird Book, Straits & Narrows, Stroke, Celestial Bodies, Empty Sleeves, Green, and From Istanbul/İstanbul’dan. Her poems “Byzantium” and “Barn” appeared in NER 17.4.

Deep Gossip can be purchased here from Bookshop.org— support independent bookstores!

[De Jarnatt’s] stories . . . have violence at their centers and are richly textured—the prose being ornate, rococo, thickly detailed.” —Janice Obuchowski, author of “Constellations” and “Mountain Shade”

From the publisher: Grace for Grace brings celebrated cult filmmaker Steve De Jarnatt’s distinctive voice and cinematic vision to the page. Lush inner lives, idiosyncratic syntax, and sweeping scale characterize these wildly imaginative stories, which present characters in search of meaning and belonging, and often, at the same time, redemption and revenge.

Steve De Jarnatt‘s fiction has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Short Stories, among others. He has worked as a writer, director, and producer in film and television for three decades, most notably writing and directing the cult classic Miracle Mile. His fiction includes two stories in NER, “Wraiths in Swelter” (NER 36.2) and “Her Great Blue” (NER 34.1).

Grace for Grace can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“The queen is back with the exact novel we need in this fraught era. A powerful testament of witness and humanity written with audacity and authority.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

From the publisher: The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves, but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. Alvarez’s essay “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical” appeared in NER 21.4.

Afterlife can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 

The Age of Phillis is the finest work on early African-American life I’ve ever read . . . This is a book to be taught, studied, held, absorbed, and treasured.” —Joanna Brooks, author of American Lazarus and Why We Left

From the publisher: In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet whose work examines culture, religion, history, and family. She is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Glory Gets, and the recipient of the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, she teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is a professor of English. Her fiction “Soon One Morning” appears in NER 25.4.

The Age of Phillis can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 

New Books from NER Authors

Spring 2020

“Hypnotically written and impressively weird, My Morningless Mornings is an intense and harrowing meditation on Stefany Anne Golberg’s youthful insomnia. More than that, though, it’s a moving mini-portrait of the bond between a father and his daughter. I really loved this book.”― Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories

From the publisher: In a ranch house in a Vegas suburb, Golberg’s peculiar brand of insomnia lives alongside an ailing father, a professor on permanent leave from the local university. Her mother has moved out, her older brother has gone to college, and she is alone with the night, resisting the fundamental unit by which we measure our lives: the next day itself.

Startling, poignant, and harrowing, Golberg’s voice is informed by an eclectic range of interests, from Bruegel to Jung, Loren Eiseley to Marina Tsvetaeva.  Equal parts coming-of-age memoir, art history, and philosophical inquiry, My Morningless Mornings is a young person’s reckoning with consciousness.

Stefany Anne Golberg  is a writer and multi-media artist who co-founded Flux Factory, an arts collective in Brooklyn. Co-authored with Morgan Meis, she published Dead People (Zero Books, 2016), a series of eulogies about cultural icons, garnering praise from Adam Gopnik, Tom Bissell, and Keith Gessen, among others. She has written for The Washington Post, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the New England Review, and was Critic in Residence at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She now lives in Detroit where she is creating a museum in her house called The Huckleberry Explorers Club. Golberg has a degree in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and an MFA in music/sound art from Bard College. Her essay “Marat Sade in Las Vegas” was published in NER Digital, and “The Hour of the Wolf” first appeared in NER 38.3. 

My Morningless Mornings can be purchased from Unnamed Press or, if your local store is closed for the time being, through Vermont Book Shop and others at Bookshop.org.

“This book is a must read if you were ever a teenage girl, played a team sport, contemplated witchcraft, and/or were alive in the 80s. If like me, all of these things apply, watch out: this book is going to get you.” —Emily Temple, Lit Hub Senior Editor

From the publisher: Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts, where the accusations began that led to the 1692 witch trials, We Ride Upon Sticks follows the 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team, who will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. In chapters dense with 1980s iconography—from Heathers to “big hair”—Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.

Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship.

Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and the New Yorker. Barry’s poem, “Lion,” appeared in NER 27.2.

We Ride Upon Sticks can be purchased from Penguin Random House or, if your local store is closed for the time being, through Vermont Book Shop and others at Bookshop.org.

“A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named ‘among the modern masters'”—Washington Post

From the publisher: Ledger’s pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (“Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw”), Hirshfield’s poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. Hirshfield’s signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world’s current and future fate.

 Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Hirshfield’s work has appeared in several issues of New England Review including NER 21.2 and NER 25.4.

Ledger can be purchased from Penguin Random House or through your local bookstore at Bookshop.org.

New Books from NER Authors

March 2020

“Phillips has the ability to be both enigmatic and reassuring in his work, always going past where you think the poem aims to go, and achieving something greater . . .” —Aaron Robertson of LitHub

From the publisher: A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance.

The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. . . . This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

Carl Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His recent books include Wild Is the Wind and the prose collection The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. His work has been published in multiple issues of NER, most recently in NER 39.1.

Pale Colors in a Tall Field can be bought through Macmillan or at your local bookstore.

“It has been 17 years since Carolyn Forché published a book of poems, and In the Lateness of the World announces she is back . . . Drawing on her own travels and periods of reporting, on the world’s seemingly endless upheaval, these poems move beyond disquiet and creates the charged ethical field in which we all live, all the time, especially at that moment we move.” —John Freeman of LitHub

From the publisher: A new poetry collection of uncanny grace and moral force from one of our country’s most celebrated poets. Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. 

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World, is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché envisions a place where “you could see everything at once . . . every moment you have lived or place you have been.” The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Her work can be found in NER 16.2.

In the Lateness of the World can be purchased from Penguin Random House or from your local bookstore.

“Here there are elegies for the self, litanies for the dead, a childlessness both mourned and celebrated, a life ripe with every hurt and desire.” —Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins

From the publisher: Fruit grapples with what it means to be childless in a world defined by procreation. Poems move between the scientific and the biblical, effortlessly sliding from the clinical landscape of a sperm bank to Mount Moriah as Abraham prepares Isaac for sacrifice. Exploring issues of sexuality, lineage, and mortality, Snider delves into subjects as varied as the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky; same-sex couple adoption; and Gregor Mendel’s death. Each poem builds into a broader examination of power and fragility, domesticity and rebellion, violence and devotion: heartrending vignettes of the aches and joys of growing up and testing the limits of nature and nurture. In language both probing and sensitive, Fruit delivers its own conflicted and celebratory answers to pressing questions of life, death, love, and biology.

Bruce Snider is the author of Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Gettysburg Review. He was a Wallace Stegner fellow, a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and a Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco. His writing has appeared in NER 37.2 and 38.3.

Fruit can be purchased from the University of Wisconsin Press or at your local bookstore.

Elizabeth Kadetsky's The Memory Eaters

A New Book from NER’s Nonfiction Editor

We are beyond excited to announce the release of a new memoir by our very own nonfiction editor, Elizabeth Kadetsky, by the University of Massachusetts Press. Pick up your copy on its official release day, March 31!

From the publisher: While trying to juggle her own life and work in the first decade of the millennium, Kadetsky was also struggling to care for her mother- a former Pucci and runway model in the deep throes of late-stage Alzheimer’s- fight with Medicare, and deal with her sister Jill- who was bouncing in and out of New York rehab and homeless centers. At the same time, Kadetsky was reconnecting with her French-Canadian family, trying to “inhabit my mother’s past in order to resolve” these decades of trauma and family secrets.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, Post Road, Agni, and elsewhere. She has written for The Village Voice, The Nation, and more. She has travelled to Malta as a creative writing fellow at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, to France as a fellow in the arts at Camargo Foundation, and to India as a two-time Fulbright fellow. She is the author of the memoir First There is a Mountain (Dzanc Books rEprint series, 2019; and Little Brown, 2004), the novella On the Island at the Center of the World (Nouvella, 2015), and the short story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014). She is an associate professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State University. She has been a nonfiction editor at New England Review for two years. 

The Memory Eaters can be purchased from University of Massachusetts Press or at your local bookstore. 

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