New England Review

New Books from NER Authors: January 2018

“A complex but emotionally effective tribute to the Irish author.” –Kirkus Reviews

From the publisher: A baseball game. Officially sanctioned torture. A chance encounter at a bar. A conversation between a parent and child. News reports of terrorist attacks.

These—plus a meditation on the transformative power of the undying work of Samuel Beckett—make up the interwoven strands of this short work by poet and critic Michael Coffey. Written according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray,” of which only six manuscript pages exist, this rhythm of themes and genres comprises a complex, mesmerizing work of fiction that has its roots in reality.

Michael Coffey received his BA in English at the University of Notre Dame and an MA from Leeds University in Anglo-Irish Literature. Former co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly, he has published three books of poems, a collection of short stories, a book about baseball’s perfect games, and co-edited a book about Irish immigration to America. Samuel Beckett is Closed can be purchased online through OR Books.

 

 

 From the publisher: A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically admired poets.

Publishers Weekly has starred the review for Phillips’s fourteenth collection,  Wild Is the Wind: “. . . These 35 poems are as haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named . . . As ever in his work, emotional dynamics resist easy resolution and the speakers unsparingly evaluate both the self and exterior world.”

Carl Phillips is the winner of the PEN Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work is forthcoming in NER 39.1. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Wild Is the Wind can be purchased directly from the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

 

From the publisher: A reckless wager between a tennis pro with a fading career and a drunken party guest—the stakes are an antique motorcycle and an heiress’s diamond necklace—launches a narrative odyssey that braids together three centuries of aspiration and adversity. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young writer soon to make his mark turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport’s earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited.

In The Maze at Windermere Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a brilliant tapestry, charting a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.

Gregory Blake Smith is the award-winning author of four novels, including The Maze at Windermere and The Divine Comedy of John Venner, a New York Times Notable Book. His short story collection, The Law of Miracles, won the Juniper Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. He has received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Smith is currently the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.

The Maze at Windermere can be purchased directly from the publisher, Viking (Random House).

 

New Books from NER Authors: December 2017

The aim of this anthology – so ably and passionately put together by the editors – is to try to shift the nature of the debate around guns and give voice to the effect of violence in a manner that isn’t always associated with the poetic. —Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award

From the publisher: Focused intensively on the crisis of gun violence in America, this volume brings together poems by dozens of our best-known poets, including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Natalie Diaz, Martín Espada, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman, Natasha Threthewey and Juan Felipe Herrera.

Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, Senator Christopher Murphy, Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston Emmanuel AME, and Virginia Tech shootings, and Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir, and Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis.

Bullets into Bells is edited by Brian Clements, Dean Rader, and Alexandra Teague. Teague’s poem “Cork” appeared in NER 24.1-2. It is available from Beacon Press and from independent booksellers.

 

This excellent, portable guide will appeal to travelers who want to write about their journeys effectively and engagingly. Its tools and techniques can help writers deepen observation, improve engagement, and enhance learning while on the move, and create rich work upon return. —Jordana Dym, editor of Mapping Latin America

From the publisher: Co-authored by Peter Chilson and Joanne B. Mulcahy, Writing Abroad is meant for travelers of all backgrounds and writing levels: a student embarking on overseas study; a retiree realizing a dream of seeing China; a Peace Corps worker in Kenya. All can benefit from documenting their adventures, whether on paper or online. Through practical advice and adaptable exercises, this guide will help travelers hone their observational skills, conduct research and interviews, choose an appropriate literary form, and incorporate photos and videos into their writing.

Peter Chilson is professor of creative writing and literature at Washington State University. He is the author of Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories, and We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. His essay “Welcome to Mali” appeared in NER 37.3.

Writing Abroad is available from the University of Chicago Press and from independent booksellers.

 

Writing at the advent of an uncertain age, Lavant continues to accompany us with her fierce interrogations – which will also endure long after us – in these elegant translations by David Chorlton. —Ellen Hinsey, author of Update on the Descent

From the David Chorlton’s introduction: Born in 1915 on July the fourth, Christine Thonhauser (Lavant) was the ninth child of a miner, Georg, and his wife, Anna, and grew up in poverty. While the poetry she was later to write contained the language of spirituality, the pain she described in it came from actual conditions which she suffered: scrofula and tuberculosis of the lungs. Being disadvantaged in health also meant she could not complete her education as intended. Unable to do hard physical work, she earned a living with knitting and weaving, until she gained a reputation as a writer. Along with these health problems, she had depression to endure. Poor hearing or blindness in her poetry were not conjured metaphors for general condition.

David Chorlton was born in Spittal-an-der-Drau, Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. As much as he has come to love the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, the setting for his work of fiction, The Taste of Fog (Rain Mountain Press, 2011). His most recent work includes Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson. His translation of a poem by Christine Lavant was included in NER 37.3.

Shatter the Bell in My Ear is available from The Bitter Oleander Press and from independent booksellers.

 

A darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power. —Kathy Fagan

From the publisher: With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown—be captured in language? “If one cannot see clearly,” Pankey writes, borrowing from Freud, “one at least wants / what is unclear to be in focus.”

Eric Pankey is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Augury and Crow-Work. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Pankey has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merril Foundation. A 1983 graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he is a professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and resides in Fairfax, Virginia. Pankey has been featured in NER numerous times, most recently appearing in NER 34.1.

Augury is available from Milkweed and from independent booksellers.

 

Chang is emerging as an exciting voice in contemporary poetry, and this is undoubtedly her most accomplished volume to date. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie – perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that “even silence is not silent.”

Victoria Chang’s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss was published by McSweeney’s and won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle.  She also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.  She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017.  She is a contributing editor of the literary journal Copper Nickel and a poetry editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Her work last appeared in New England Review in NER 38.3.

Barbie Chang is available from Copper Canyon Press and from independent booksellers.

 

“[Brimhall] allows us brief visions, glimpses, of experiences more lush and raw than our own.” —The Rumpus

From the publisher: Inspired by stories from her Brazilian-born mother, Traci Brimhall’s third collection—a lush and startling “autobiomythography”—is reminiscent of the rich imaginative worlds of Latin American magical realists. Set in the Brazilian Amazon, Saudade is one part ghost story, one part revival, and is populated by a colorful cast of characters and a recurring chorus of irreverent Marias.

Traci Brimhall is the author of two previous poetry collections. She earned her PhD from Western Michigan University and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas. Her work most recently appeared in New England Review NER 37.1.

Saudade is available from Copper Canyon Press and from independent booksellers.

 

New Books from NER Authors: October 2017

With an unstinting eye, Pimentel gathers in this book the disembodied, the lost and unhomed, the migrants at the border, the ones holding meth in their palms like ‘crystal glittering,’ the ones in the throes of withdrawal . . . The crossings Pimentel speaks of are perilous, but I am glad to have her as a guide, because she has the capacity for finding the smallest lights in the incinerated cities, shining through glass or the throats of pipes. —Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller Than a Pencil Eraser 

From the publisher: El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Juárez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina’s life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city—but the breadth of a country—away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much “a body will hold,” reaching from the border to the poet’s own Philippines.

Born in Manila and raised in the United States and Saudia Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is the winner of the 2011 American Book Award for her collection of poems, Insides She Swallowed. Selected as a finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature, Pimentel’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Crazy Horse, and NER 36.4. Pimentel teaches contemporary American poetry, poetry writing, and creative nonfiction writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.

For Want of Water can be purchased directly from the publisher, Beacon Press.

In this riveting debut, Marian Crotty’s characters illuminate the improbably beautiful space between knowing exactly what’s wrong and being powerless to fix it. –Alicia Erian, author of The Brutal Language of Love

From the publisher: In these nine stories, Marian Crotty inhabits the lives of people searching for human connection. Her characters, most often young women, are honest, troubled, and filled with longing. The stories are set in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Persian Gulf, and often touch on themes of addiction, class, sexuality, and gender. What Counts as Love is a poignant, often funny collection that asks us to take it and its characters seriously.

Crotty is an assistant professor at Loyola University Maryland. Her short stories and personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals such as the Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her essay “It’s New Year’s Eve, and This Is Dubai,” appeared in NER 34.2. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

What Counts as Love can be purchased directly from University of Iowa Press or from independent booksellers.

James Longenbach knows as much about how poems work as anyone in the world, but he hides this knowledge behind poems that feel so real and artless they hardly seem composed at all. The poems in Earthling are mythological in their simplicity . . . —John Koethe

From the publisher: “Earthling” is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth. In poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Beginning with the death of the earthling’s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the poems within Earthling resist complaint or agitation. In them, the real and the imagined, the material and the allegorical, intersect at shifting angles and provide fresh perspectives and lasting consolation.

Longenbach is the author of four previous volumes of poetry and six volumes of literary criticism.  His contributions to New England Review include the essays “Poetic Compression” (32.1) and “Line and Syntax” (28.4). He lives in Rochester, New York, where he teaches at the University of Rochester.

Earthling can be purchased directly from W. W. Norton or from independent booksellers.

Geminder’s book showcases an acute sensitivity to worlds both inside and out. There’s real delicacy to the craft but underneath all the skill is a shaking sense of purpose, and a great love of the brokenness and beauty of humanity. This is a substantive, memorable debut. —Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

From the publisher: With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the sparks of villagers below. In Cambodia, four young women confuse themselves with the ghost of a dead reporter. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.

Geminder’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. She has worked as a journalist in New York and Cambodia, and is a Provost’s Fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

Dead Girls and Other Stories can be purchased directly from Dzanc Books or from independent booksellers.

To attempt to deconstruct these poems would be to blow them apart. They are utterly contemporary. They are deeply intimate. They are the lashes of a forest of thought.”
—Mary Jo Bang, author of The Last Two Seconds: Poems

From the publisher: A stunning debut collection that examines the geophilosophy of lyric poetry. Here the “beheaded” poet displaces her mind into the landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, as absurd as insomnia and dream. Some Beheadings asks three questions: “How does thinking happen?” “What does thinking feel like?” “How do I think about the future?” The second question takes primacy over the others, reflecting on what poets and critics have called “the sensuous intellect,” what needs to be felt in language, the contours of questions touched in sound and syntax.

Admit Machado is an Indian poet. Previous works include Route: Marienbad and her translation of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver. Her poem “Outside the Aviary” appeared in NER 33.2.

Some Beheadings can be purchased directly from Nightboat Books or from independent booksellers.

[A] simmering debut . . . at once clinically precise and brazenly effusive, vulnerable, and extraordinarily daring, sax’s poems redefine ‘madness’ altogether . . . feral, soaring, and uncommonly beautiful. —Booklist

In this ­­­powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.

Sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. His poem “Will” appeared in NER 36.3. Madness can be purchased directly from Penguin Books or from independent booksellers.

[In Some Say the Lark], each dynamic formal shift, each nimble swing in register, reveals a different kind of quiet; a freshconsideration of familiar attempts to “redress sorrow” in a way that is more real and true.—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review

From the Publisher: Chang’s poems narrate grief and loss, and intertwines them with hope for a fresh start in the midst of new beginnings. With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, which was a finalist for the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers, and listed by Hyphen Magazine as a Top Five Book of Poetry for 2008. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, the Nation, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC with her family. She most recently appeared in New England Review with her poem “The World” (36.1.)

Some Say the Lark can be purchased directly from Alice James Books or from independent booksellers.

New Books from NER Authors: September 2017

Wesley Rothman’s pulsating debut Subwoofer is a collection of the needful songs we sing for each other. The poems are full of gorgeous and introspective exclamations made out of protest, out of rhymes, out of metronomes, oceans, and love. Each poem crackles with its own unexpected rhythms and the sum of all these exquisite sounds is a thoughtful exploration of spirituality and wonder.   —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

From the publisher: Subwoofer makes audible the deep bass of history, for this is a book of vibrant, honest listening: to the voices of Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Basquiat; to those without names; to the sadness of loss and the bitter silences within privilege and racism; to the luck of being alive. This book of witness, elegy, and renewal makes a noise that is joyful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.

Wesley Rothman’s work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Golden Shovel Anthology, among others. Recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, Rothman teaches in Washington, DC, while pursuing a doctorate in literature.

Subwoofer can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

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Vicious and haunting, luminescent and big-hearted, Alex McElroy’s writing burrows its way to the deep tissue of feeling and lodges there, determined. A gripping and nervy dissection of familial ties and the ambivalent bonds that structure our reality, Daddy Issues will leave you undone.
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

From the publisher: There are oil slicks in a patrilineal line—spaces in which paternal securities and filial affections lurch and loosen. So how does a daddy make do? In Alex McElroy’s collection Daddy Issues, daddies mourn their children; daddies absent themselves from their children; daddies take the shapes of celebrities to steal away the disguised wives of their children. Sometimes, daddies burn in a barn. Through an accumulation of gears, string, and brute pectoral muscle, McElroy brings these daddies back to life that we may see them as they are, in all their splendor and flop.

Alex McElroy’s writing appears in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and New England Review. He is the recipient of the 2016 Neutrino Prize from Passages North. His essay Endure was recently featured in NER 37.4 (Hear it read at NER Out Loud by Steven Medina.)

Daddy Issues can be purchased directly from its publisher The Cupboard.

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Weil showcases his narrative abilities in these offbeat and spirited stories . . .Weil’s stories have the scope and detours of longer work, and often seem to move on their own, following the protagonists’ unpredictable lives. The breadth of subject matter and styles is impressive, defying easy categorization and making the stories all the more memorable.―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Following his debut Dayton Literary Peace Prize-winning novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history. Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.

Josh Weil is the author of The Great Glass Sea and The New Valley. A Fulbright Fellow and National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, he has been awarded The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a Pushcart. His essay “Liberation Square” appeared in NER 27.2.

The Age of Perpetual Light is published by Grove Press and can be found online.

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This Blessed Earth is a sort of universal story of family farmers and all they’re up against in their efforts to take care of the land and make a living from it. It’s also a crash course in the history that brought us to this place of corporate power, shrinking resources, and a changing climate. But it plants seeds of hope as the next generation prepares to inherit the family land and all the joys and challenges that come with it.—Willie Nelson, founder and president of Farm Aid

From the publisher: For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

Ted Genoways is an acclaimed journalist and author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. A contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard, he is the winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and is a two-time James Beard Foundation Award finalist. His work has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 33.4.

This Blessed Earth can be purchased directly from its publisher Norton.

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Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language―especially where gender is concerned―to more fully capture the experience of a self “unlimited in its possibilities.” The setting of her third collection is woodsy, nocturnal, and by turns sinister and merciful; where “it did get dark” enough to see the stars “but how bright it was.” A range of characters compose a makeshift cast―or family―fluid enough to include a hermit, a cowboy, and a dowager. These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization.
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work by a space-age balladeer.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two previous collections. Her poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 36.3.

Rocket Fantastic can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

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The body becomes more than mystical in [Calling a Wolf a Wolf], as the boundaries between flesh and world are not merely blurred, but shattered—bodies are thrown upon all the sharp crooked edges of life and Akbar diligently records every detail of the aftermath. . . —Frontier Poetry

From the publisher: This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in the New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida. His poem “No Is A Complete Sentence” was recently published in NER 37.4.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf can be purchased online directly from its publisher Alice James.

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Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans.―Jamaal May

From the publisher: Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and “the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.”

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poem “Exiliados” was recently published in NER 38.1 .

Unaccompanied can be purchased online from its publisher, Copper Canyon Press.

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