New England Review

NER Author Books—August 2018

Imagine yourself in an ideal classroom under the spell of an ideal teacher of poetry. That’s what it’s like to keep company with James Longenbach in the pages of How Poems Get Made. Gentle, learned, free-spirited, wide-ranging in taste, Longenbach roams from Anglo-Saxon poetry through the Renaissance to poets reinventing the art in English in our day. — Rosanna Warren

From the publisher: How Poems Get Made is a comprehensive guide to writing or reading poetry, by “one of our most lucid and important critics” (American Academy of Arts and Letters).

James Longenbach is the author of many other books of both poetry and literary criticism, including Earthling: Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, The Iron Key: Poems, The Art of the Poetic Line, and The Virtues of Poetry. Longenbach’s work is often published in the New Yorker and Paris Review, and his poems and essays have appeared in NER, most recently in NER 32.1. 

How Poems Get Made can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

This is a gorgeous book, visually, conceptually, and in the delights of reading. Stanley Plumly . . . thinks as a poet, writes as a poet, with the sure-footedness of an informed scholar and on-site researcher. Constable and Turner would come back to life just to see themselves in Elegy Landscapes, and do so, virtually, in Plumly’s vivid illuminations.” — Susan J. Wolfson, professor of English, Princeton University

From the publisher: Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant”  nonfiction (Washington Post), explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner . . . Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapestakes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

Stanley Plumly has authored ten books of poetry and four works of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes, Posthumous Keats, and The Immortal Evening. Winner of the Truman Capote Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize, among others. Plumly’s essay Does Ripe Fruit Never Fall? appeared in NER 37.1, and his poetry appeared most recently in NER 37.3

Elegy Landscapes can be purchased at your local bookstore or online.

In this country, AIDS is no longer a quick death sentence. Jacques J. Rancourt, born the year AZT was released, makes visible its wreckage in the present. The plague years—queer bodies kissed by death and public scorn—shadow the speaker as he cruises, travels, and marries. Rancourt’s language is finely chiseled, attentive to the spiritual and the carnal. Each poem reminds us to live, to remember. —Eduardo C. Corral (author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize)

From the publisher: The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the inaugural title in our chapbook series is Jacques J. Rancourt‘s In the Time of PrEP. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017). He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. In addition to NER (32.4) and other journals, Rancourt’s poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in Best New Poets.  He lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In the Time of PrEP can be found at your local independent bookseller or online.

New Books by NER Authors (July)

Over and over, the poems in Justin Bigos’s Mad River call on the Divine. But paying attention is also a kind of prayer, and Bigos’s poetry does just that by invoking the details of the world it asks us to inhabit. Whether in Texas, Pittsburgh, or Chicago, these poems shimmer.—C. Dale Young, author of The Halo 

“These are astonishing and unforgettable poems, poems of loneliness and mercy, of violence and grace. Justin Bigos has written here one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a very long time—monumental, memorial, and alive!” —Matt Hart, author of Radiant Action and Radiant Heart.

Justin Bigos is the author of a previous collection of poems, the chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO, 2014). His writing has appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Forklift Ohio, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The Best American Short Stories 2015. He cofounded and coedits the literary journal Waxwing and makes his home in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he teaches at Northern Arizona University. His poems “Three Rivers” and “Prayer After Refusing to Pray” appeared in NER 33.4. 

Mad River can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

Rachel Hadas’s new translation of the Iphigenia plays carves out its own space among recent translations of Euripides. None of them are quite so vivid, so contemporary, or (above all) so full of poetic interest. For those serious readers of poetry, Hadas’s translation will also stand out as constantly intriguing, inventive, and various.—John Talbot, author of Rough Translation: Poems

From the publisher: Poet and translator Rachel Hadas highlights the lyricism, emotion, and sheer humanity of Euripides’s plays. Mordant humor is here; so are heartbreak and tenderness. Hadas offers an Iphigenia story that resonates with our own troubled times and demonstrates anew the genius of one of the world’s supreme dramatists.

Rachel Hadas is a professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark, and is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations, including Questions in the Vestibule (Northwestern, 2016) and Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry. She is the editor (with Peter Constantine, Edmund Keeley, and Karen Van Dyck) of the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. Her work, both poetry and nonfiction, has appeared in many issues of NER to list, most recently in 36.1.

The Iphigenia Plays can be purchased at your local bookstore or directly from the publisher.

Hayes addresses this marvelous series of 70 free-verse sonnets to his potential assassin: a nameless, faceless embodiment of America’s penchant for racially motivated violence. The poems are redolent of his signature rhythmic artistry and wordplay . . . Inventive as ever, Hayes confronts America’s myriad ills with unflinching candor, while leaving space for love, humor, and hope. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered—the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award; Wind in a Box; Hip Logic; and Muscular Music, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2014 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowshop. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Several of his sonnets from this collection were published in NER 39.1.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin can be found at your local bookstore or online.

Hummel . . . presents a polished, droll, and provocative art-world thriller . . . With a cast of strong and complicated female characters, headed by a determined, reckless, funny, and imperiled amateur sleuth, Hummel crafts a shrewd and suspenseful inquiry into womanhood and the dark side of the art market, punctuated by striking variations on identity, portraiture, and “still lives.”—Booklist

“In this taut take on noir, misogyny, and the art of responsible storytelling, Hummel (Motherland, 2014, etc.) balances the glitz and glam of the Los Angeles art world with the town tourists don’t often see, from peeling, postwar bungalows to skid row tent cities and suffering junkies . . . This is a whip-smart mystery and a moving meditation on the consumption of female bodies all rolled into one.” —Kirkus Reviews

Maria Hummel is the author of the poetry collection House and Fire, winner of the 2013 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and two novels: Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and Wilderness Run (St. Martin’s, 2003). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry, Narrative, the Sun, the New York Times, and the centenary anthology The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. A Stegner Fellow, she taught at Stanford for nine years. She lives in Vermont with her husband and two sons, and teaches at the University of Vermont. Her short story “No Others Before Me” appeared in NER 31.2.

Still Lives can be purchased at your local bookstore or online.

Lisa Lewis writes of complex women as friends, mothers, sisters, “cat ladies,” dog walkers, and lovers. She writes with an astute awareness of class dynamics, the earth’s peril as a result of our violence, and our violent America—past and present. —Denise Duhamel

From the publisher: In Taxonomy of the Missing, Lisa Lewis’s sixth collection of poetry, the past is present, finely-detailed and filtered, but never diminished by, the kind of tender regret that accrues only after decades of lived experience.

Lisa Lewis‘s previous books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series), Vivisect, Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize), and The Body Double. A chapbook titled Story Box was also published as winner of the Poetry West Chapbook Contest. Lewis’s poem “Dry Hollows” appeared in NER 36.4.

Taxonomy of the Missing can be purchased directly from the publisher.


The Bible of Dirty Jokes is a bawdy and absorbing read—a madcap mystery about family secrets, small time stand-up comedy and big-time crimes. Visit the back alleys of the Borscht Belt and the underworld beyond with Eileen Pollack, one of our finest, and funniest, writers.—Claire Vaye Watkins

From the publisher: In The Bible of Dirty Jokes, Eileen Pollack (Breaking and Entering, A Perfect Life) brings to life the hilarious and moving history of Borscht Belt comedy, Catskills resorts, and the notorious Jewish mob, Murder Inc. In a novel that reads like a cross between The Sopranos and a Sarah Silverman special, Pollack bestows on American literature a protagonist for the ages, the wisecracking, starry-eyed, endlessly generous and forgiving Ketzel Weinrach.

Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction. In addition to The Bible of Dirty Jokes (Four Way Books 2018), Breaking and Entering (2012), she has published In The Mouth (2008), and is the recipient of various fellowships. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Best American series and elsewhere; she has been published by NER multiple times, most recently in 32.4. Pollack lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor, where she teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

The Bible of Dirty Jokes can be found at your local bookstore or online.

All the distinguishing characteristics we’ve come to associate with Elizabeth Spires’ poems—their shimmering clarity, verbal restraint, and self-interrogations—are enacted in this new work of meticulous surfaces and surprising depths… — Michael Waters, author of Celestial Joyride

From the publisher: In A Memory of the Future, Elizabeth Spires details the search for a core identity, meditating on the necessary divide between the social persona who navigates the world and the artist’s secret self. As the poems move from Zen reflections outward into the identifiable worlds of Manhattan and Maryland’s Eastern shore, houses, both real and imagined, become metaphorical extensions of the self and psyche.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of seven poetry collections, including Worldling and The Wave-Maker. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, among others. A professor at Goucher College, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry was featured in NER 35.1. 

A Memory of the Future can be purchased directly from the publisher.

 


C. Dale Young’s stories masterfully illuminate the moments in which regret and longing and grace powerfully collide—and transform the topography of a life. The Affliction is an exhilarating collection: I emerged deeply grateful for the existence of this book.—Laura van den Berg

From the publisher: Young writes of people who know what it is to be disappeared—desaparecidos—and of those who know what it is to have to hide. He renders the grueling, distorting effect of such disappearances on individuals and on those who know them in love or fear or wonder. The Affliction provides powerful testament to the notion of stories as resistance to loss. This is a book of necessary, clear-hearted affirmation in troubled times.

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016); The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018) is his first fiction collection. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Guernica, the Hopkins Review, Normal School, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares, as well as anthologies and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

The Affliction: A Novel in Stories can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

New Books from NER Authors: June 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

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.

 

 

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