NER contributor Averill Curdy has released her debut book of poems, Song & Error. From the publishers:

“A sparrow like a ‘fumbled punch line’ is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age. In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal’s beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy’s poems strive to endure within “the crease of transformation”, and to speak and sing of that terrible beauty.”

Averill Curdy lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University. Her poems have been published in both the United States and England, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her poem “The Salmon” appeared in NER 27.1.

Song & Error is available at Powell’s and other booksellers.