. . . as he struggles to understand the meaning of family, love, and death, Gallaher addresses life questions in a way that few poets of his generation have been willing to risk.—BOA Editions

We are pleased to announce the publication of In a Landscape (BOA Editions), a book-length poem by NER contributor John Gallaher. His poem “Your Lover, Later” was featured in 30.1 and “In a Landscape: VI” first appeared in 33.2.

“Reading these poems is like listening in on the thoughts of a brilliant mind at work on unsolvable, often existential, problems, the poet always peering outward, toward a landscape of autobiography and memory that ‘goes on all night, dotted with little fires.'” —Kevin Prufer, author of National Anthem

John Gallaher is the author of The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way, 2007), Map of the Folded World (University of Akron Press, 2009), and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions Ltd., 2011), co-written with G. C. Waldrep. He currently teaches at Northwest Missouri State University and co-edits the Laurel Review.

 

. . . a collision of bodies, cultures, opportunity and motive, innocence and experience that layers a coming-of-age story into a multi-cultural background.—Martha Collins, author of White Papers

We are pleased to announce the publication of NER contributor Carole Simmons Oles’s most recent collection of poetry, A Selected History of Her Heart (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Her poem “Travel With the Missing” was featured in 20.3.

“These powerhouse poems reach out generation to generation with generosity and compassion. These poems invite us in, offer food and drink and shelter.”—Peggy Shumaker, author of Gnawed Bones.

Carole Simmons Oles has authored eight other collections of poetry, including The Deed: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1991) and Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer (University of Arkansas Press, 2006).

 

Propelled by layers of allusion and irony, Howard’s account of the children is a comedy with a plot. Howard gained fame for verse in the voices of literary and historical characters, often very sophisticated ones: the sixth-graders here are as much fun as any characters in any poetry this year, even as their improbably long senteces ask, seriously, “how the system we’re trying / to live by operates.”—Publishers Weekly

MacArthur Grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, and NER author Richard Howard has published his most recent book of poetry, A Progressive Education (Turtle Point). Garnering from his own school days, Howard uses the voices of children at a Cleveland private school to probe serious questions with irony and wit. Howard’s poem “Eidyia: An Interview” was featured in NER 27.1.

“It seems to me that, in the voices of L. Frank Baum, Wallace Stevens, and a whole cast of others, Richard has been working toward these fifth graders all along, minds bent on creative engagement with knowledge but able to stave off, for the span of their youth, for the span of a poem, an excess of hopelessness, which damns all art and life. Richard’s work in and on behalf of poetry is, precisely, an antidote to hopelessness.”—Craig Morgan Teicher for the Los Angeles Review of Books