New Books from NER Authors: June 2018

June 18, 2018

From Mark Twain to George Saunders, Bradley Bazzle’s Trash Mountain joins a long tradition of dark humor, wild inventiveness, and social satire in American letters. ―Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza.

From the publisher: Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way.

Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award. His short story “Gift Horse” appeared in NER 31.4. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.

Trash Mountain can be purchased from your independent booksellers and online.

In a time when we confront daily the frenetic, desensitizing maelstrom of political rhetoric and a ubiquitous flood of mass media, Bruce Bond reminds us in Dear Reader of the quiet but urgent philosophical and spiritual inquiries, sometimes monstrous and animal, that define and affirm our humanity. —Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City and Correspondence

From the publisher: In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world—the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts.

Bruce Bond is the author of sixteen books including For the Lost Cathedral, The Other Sky, and Black Anthem, which won a Tampa Review Prize in 2016. Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas. His poem “Blood” was published in NER 36.2.

Dear Reader can be purchased directly from the publisher.

Like the birds that populate so many of his poems, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Dulce is a lesson in song, an instructive repetition of the melodies that shape the inner self. The poems here are for a reader willing to mix and remix, to reimagine themselves in a thousand pieces. —Matthew Shenoda, author of Somewhere Else

From the publisher: Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet. Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a Canto Mundo fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He cofounded the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award from Poets and Writers magazine. His poems “Pulling the Moon” and “Rituals of Healing” appeared in NER 35.2.

Dulce: Poems can be purchased from the publisher.

Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk. ―The New York Times

From the publisher: Tony Hoagland’s poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less skeptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoagland’s poetry has gotten bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces―and spaciousness―in the human predicament.

Tony Hoagland is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Application for Release from the Dream and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two of his poems appeared recently in NER 38.3.

Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God can be purchased online.

Norman Lock’s fiction, The Wreckage of Eden, shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. ―NPR

From the Publisher: Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.

Norman Lock is an author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has honored with The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His fiction has appeared frequently in NER, most recently with “A Theory of the Self” in NER 34.2.

The Ensemble can be purchased directly from the publisher, or from independent booksellers.

Well imagined, intricately plotted, and deeply felt, both humane and human. It unfurls like a peony: you keep thinking it can’t get any more perfect, and it does. A stunning feat. —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History and Koolaids: The Art of War

From the publisher: A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Harper’s, and Tin House, among others. Her story “The Briefcase” was featured in New England Review 29.2.

The Great Believers can be purchased directly from the publisher.

New Books from NER Authors: May 2018

May 7, 2018

These powerful, challenging essays show why Berry’s vision of a sustainable, human-scaled society has proven so influential. ―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities.

Wendell Berry, essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky. His poetry is featured in early issues of NER, and his essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” was published in NER 10.1.

The World-Ending Fire can be purchased directly from the publisher, Powell’s Books, and independent booksellers.

Aja Gabel’s powerful debut offers a sensitive portrait of four young musicians forging their paths through life: sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes in harmony, but always inextricably linked by their shared pasts.” —Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere.

From the Publisher: The addictive novel about four young friends navigating a cutthroat world and their complex relationships with each other, as ambition, passion, and love intertwine over the course of their lives.

Aja Gabel’s writing has appeared in NER (30.3), BOMB, the Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A former cellist, Gabel earned her BA at Wesleyan University, her MFA at the University of Virginia, and PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Gabel has been the recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Literary Arts Oregon, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a fellow in fiction. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

The Ensemble can be purchased directly from the publisher, Powell’s Books, and independent booksellers.

Reading this beautiful novel, I felt I was watching a brilliant mind invent new tools for thinking. Sheila Heti wrings revelation from the act of asking, again and again, in ever more challenging and innovative ways, impossible questions of existence. —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You.

From the Publisher: In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be? which was a New York Times Notable Book and was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker. She is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes, and is the former Interviews Editor for the Believer magazine. In addition to NER (26.4), her work has been published in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and n+1.

Motherhood can be purchased from the publisher, Powell’s Books, and independent booksellers.

Seuss’s fevered lines get under your skin until reading becomes a visceral experience. —The San Francisco Chronicle

From the publisher: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces—details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish—the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”

Diane Seuss is the author of Four-Legged Girl and two previous poetry collections, It Blows You Hollow and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. In addition to NER (36.4), her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2014, the Georgia Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College and lives in Michigan.

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl can be purchased from Powell’s Books and independent booksellers.

New Books from NER Authors: April 2018

April 16, 2018

Brotherly love, a sense of displacement and lost time, and the deep care that reminds us of our humanity, form the heart of this book. These poems are a scavenger’s guide, a survivalist manifesto, a reminder of the way our daily experiences can fuel and forge our faith. A hauntingly beautiful and unusual debut.
—Dorianne Laux

From the publisher: Set against a landscape of rail yards and skate parks, Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut collection captures a spiritual journey of wanderlust, depression, brotherhood, and survival. These poems—a “verse novella” in documentary form—build momentum as they travel across the stark landscapes of the American West: hopping trains through dusty prairie towns, swapping stories with mystics and outlaws, skirting the edges of mountains and ridges, heading ever westward to find meaning in the remnants of a ruined Romantic ideal. Part cowboy poet, part prophet, Carlson-Wee finds beauty in the grit and kinship among strangers along the road.

Carlson-Wee’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, and Missouri Review, which selected a group of his poems for the 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize. He has received fellowships and awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fund. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco, and is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.

Rail can be purchased from BOA Editions.

I know this book changed me. The book itself knows change, how to change itself, knows so well how transformation—vast essential change which would seem to oppose a self—brings a person ever closer to their truth. —Brenda Shaughnessy

From the publisher: In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US-Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn—sometimes all at once.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States at age five through the mountains of Tijuana. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and is the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program. He cofounded Undocupoets, for which he was awarded the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in PBS NewsHour, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, and BuzzFeed, among others. He lives in California where he teaches at Sacramento State University.

Cenzontle can be purchased directly from the publisher, BOA Editions.

Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush . . . poems. Aphorisms . . . from another dimension.—The New York Times

From the publisher: Poetry. Asian American Studies. With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.

Nezhukumatathil has been widely celebrated for her lush imagination and all-embracing style. Preoccupied with earth science since childhood, Nezhukumatathil crafts her research-based poetry using curious phenomena of the natural world; realizing a vision of strangeness and beauty. Her full-length debut, Miracle Fruit, Poems, won the Tupelo press prize in 2003, followed by her Balcones prize-winning At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press, 2007). Her third collection, Lucky Fish (Tupelo Press, 2011), was the winner of a gold medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Independent Books. Her many other honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Nezhukumatathil serves as the poetry editor of Orion magazine. She teaches creative writing and environmental literature as a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she lives with her husband and sons.

Oceanic can be purchased online.

Poetry at full boil, poured with deliberate abandon. —David Orr, the New York Times’ Ten Favorite Poetry Books of the Year

From the publisher: Kevin Prufer‘s How He Loved Them sets love in a fraught, paradoxical world where bombs explode, fields burn, and armies advance. With clear, compassionate eyes, Prufer finds powerful intimacy between fathers and sons, soldiers and civilians, the living and the (sometimes un)dead. An exceptional new work by a necessary voice.

Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including the Four Way Books title Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of many awards, he teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University, and lives in Houston.

How He Loved Them can be purchased online.

Melissa Stein’s sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority. —Mark Doty

From the publisher: In this lush, disturbing second collection from Melissa Stein, exquisite images are salvaged from harm and survival. Set against the natural world’s violence—both ordinary and sublime—pain shines jewel-like out of these poems, illuminating what lovers and families conceal. Stein uses her gifts for persona and lyric richness to build worlds that are vivid, intricate, tough, sexy, and raw: “over and over // life slapping you in the face / till you’re newly burnished / flat-out gasping and awake.” Breathless with risk and redemption, Terrible Blooms shows how loss claims us and what we reclaim.

Melissa Stein’s poetry collection Rough Honey won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, the Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won awards from Redivider, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She is a freelance editor in San Francisco.

Terrible Blooms can be purchased online.

New Books from NER Authors: March 2018

March 21, 2018

“What a gift Kazim Ali’s Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. ” —Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

From the publisher: Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress.

Kazim Ali is a poet, editor, and prose writer who teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, and Sky Ward, which won the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. His poem “Origin Story” was published in NER 38.1.

Purchase Inquisition from Wesleyan University Press.

“Through the language of coding, mathematics, and musical notation, the characters in these stories analyze their worlds through ordered systems of logic that attempt to make sense of the inexplicability of grief and loss.” —Anne Valente

From the publisher: Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker’s sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person.

Matthew Baker is the author of the children’s novel If You Find This, a Booklist Top Ten Debut of 2015 and an Edgar Award Nominee for Best Juvenile Mystery. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, New England Review (“Sensei” in 35.4), Southern Review, Electric Literature, One Story, and elsewhere.

Hybrid Creatures can be purchased directly from the publisher, LSU Press.

“These whimsical, sincere, giddy-making stories are told with the imperative of a fabulist and the precision of a poet. Cadmium overlays syntax and character so that figures of speech and weird tropes of thought and language become solid, consequential and urgent.” —Andrew Tonkovich, Editor, Santa Monica Review

From the publisher: Michael Cadnum‘s Earthquake Murder is a collection of short fiction published in a variety anthologies and magazines in recent years and collected here for the first time. Featuring a foreword by radio and publishing force Andrew Tonkovick, these surprising, often ironic stories capture a world of danger and discovery.

Michael Cadnum is the author of thirty-five books, including the National Book Award Finalist The Book of the Lion, In a Dark Wood, Saint Peter’s Wolf, and Ghostwright. His story “Champion of the Ocean Floor” appeared in NER 20.4.

Earthquake Murder is available for purchase online.

“Sands Hall’s transcendent memoir, Flunk. Start., describes, with precise and utterly absorbing detail, her experience in the world of Scientology. But this is also astory that explores so many issues—how language is used to both illuminate and obscure, how we long for connection and meaning; it’s also a vivid portrait of how we find a place in our family and find a path through chaos. I could not put down this book—it is a triumph, a work of great honesty and insight. It is a necessary book for our time.” —Karen E. Bender, author of Refund

From the publisher: In Flunk. Start., Sands Hall chronicles her slow yet willing absorption into the Church of Scientology. Her time in the Church, the late 1970s, includes the secretive illness and death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and the ascension of David Miscavige. Hall compellingly reveals what drew her into the religion—what she found intriguing and useful—and how she came to confront its darker sides.

Sands Hall is the author of the novel, Catching Heaven, a Willa Award Finalist for Best Contemporary Fiction, and a Random House Reader’s Circle selection; and of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. She teaches at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Community of Writers, Squaw Valley, and is a Teaching Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Hall lives in Nevada City.

Flunk. Start. can be purchased from Counterpoint Press.

“These bracing, vulnerable poems embody the central mystery of poetry: what is riven is made whole.” —James Longenbach

From the publisher: Rest is a vivid, powerful collection examining the human cost of crossing the border. In 2010, Margaree Little was working for a humanitarian mission near Tucson when, along with a group of volunteers, she found the unidentified dead body of a man, who a medical examiner would later estimate died at least six months before. This discovery serves as the jumping-off point to a stunning, elegiac series of poems commemorating an imagined, unknown life. Anchored by Little’s keen eye and unsparing self-reflection, this collection asks us to examine how a single life can affect so many others.

Margaree Little received her BA from Brown University and MFA from Warren Wilson College. The recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and various fellowships, scholarships and residencies, Little teaches creative writing at Kenyon College.

Rest can be purchased online at UPNE Book Partners.

“Accessible and engaging, Jay Parini’s The Way of Jesus is a cross between a memoir and a travel diary, except the landscape he is exploring is his own soul. The compelling spiritual narrative that results is informed by insight, personal reflection, and wide reading. In his own words, it is all about resurrection—now.” —The Right Reverend Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter

From the publisher: A follow-up to his 2013, Jesus: The Human Face of God, this new book is part spiritual autobiography and part intellectual journey, offering an account of what Parini calls “The Christian Mind” from the viewpoint of a liberal Christian. Throughout this intensely personal guide to living a spiritual and ethical life, he explores the question of what it really means to practice Christianity and draws extensively from readings in world literature and religions, offering synthesis of his five decades of scholarship on the topic.

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015. He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H. M., and The Last Station, the last made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

The Way of Jesus can be purchased directly from the publisher, Beacon Press.

“There is no other contemporary voice quite like his, and I believe that, taken as a whole, Kevin Prufer’s prognostic backward gaze may someday prove to have shown us where we were going before we got there.” —Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review

Kevin Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. He teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University. His poem “In the Wheat Field” appeared in NER 36.1.

How He Loved Them can be purchased from Four Way Books.

New England Review

New Books from NER Authors: June 2018

New Books from NER Authors: May 2018

New Books from NER Authors: April 2018

New Books from NER Authors: March 2018

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