“The most moving and expansive poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright.”

New England Review congratulates David Baker on the publication of his new book of poetry, Scavenger Loop (W. W. Norton & Company). Baker is an NER author with poetry forthcoming in NER 36.2.

Baker’s latest work layers the natural history of his beloved Midwest and traces the “complex history of human habitation, from family and village life to the evolving nature of work and the mysterious habitats of the heart.”

David Baker is the author of Never-Ending Birds and several other collections, and has won awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. He is editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University.

 Purchase this book at W.W. Norton & Company or at independent booksellers.

 

Congratulations to NER contributor Sally Keith on the publication of her newest collection, River House (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which features poems of absence written after the loss of her mother. Keith is the author of The Fact of the Matter and two previous collections of poetry, Design and Dwelling Song. She is a faculty member of the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, DC. Keith’s poem “Song from the Rain” appeared in NER 24.4, and two  poems, “In the Desert Near . . .” and “What heavenward gesture . . . ” in NER 33.2. In addition, her essay “The Spirit of the Beehive” appeared as an original New England Review Digital piece in our ongoing series, Confluences.

“. . . when you’re finished reading, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again.  I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss.” —James Longenbach, author of The Iron Key

Purchase River House at Milkweed Editions or at independent booksellers. 

 

“Waldrep offers us his most necessary book, one that asks us that question we fear ourselves to ask: how is this real, any of it, all of it, faith, language, light, history, and that cipher that collects them all, the human heart?” —Dan Beachy-Quick

We are pleased to announce the publication of G. C. Waldrep‘s latest work, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). From the publisher: A book-length poem, Testament addresses matters as diverse as Mormonism, cymatics, race, Dolly the cloned sheep, and his own life and faith. Drafted over twelve trance-like days while in residence at Hawthornden Castle, Waldrep . . . tackles the question of whether gender can be a lyric form. Intimately autobiographical, Waldrep’s fifth book masterly takes its own place in the American tradition of the long poem.

Waldrep’s most recent poems in New England Review include “What David Taught and Where He Taught It” (NER 34.3-4) and “Their Faces Shall Be As Flames” (NER 35.3). The recipient of multiple awards, Waldrep teaches at Bucknell University, is editor for the literary journal West Branch, and editor-at-large for Kenyon Review.

Purchase Testament at BOA Editions, Ltd. or at independent booksellers. 

 

“An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry.” — Penguin Classics

NER congratulates Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk on their new anthology The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (edited with poet Irina Mashinski, Penguin Classics, 2015). From the publisher: This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets—Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them—in captivating modern translations.

Chandler and Dralyuk’s translations and writings have appeared in the special section “The Russian Presence” of New England Review‘s double issue 34.3-4. Chandler is a poet and translator of many works of Russian literature and teaches part time at Queen Mary, University of London. Dralyuk is a lecturer in Russian at the University of St. Andrews and translator of many books from Russian.

Purchase The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry from Penguin Classics or an independent bookseller. 

  “A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.” —W. S. Merwin

 

We are pleased to announce the publication of NER contributor Mark Doty‘s newest collection of poems Deep Lane (Norton 2015). From Publisher’s Weekly: “Having gained renown for his self-consciously beautiful, heart-on-sleeve elegies, Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet.”

Mark Doty’s work appears in NER volumes 13.3-4, 31.2, and 32.1. He has published eight volumes of poetry, and his collection Fire to Fire won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Doty’s work has also received numerous honors including the National Book Critics Circle Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor and writer-in-residence at Rutgers University.

Purchase Deep Lane at W. W. Norton & Company or at independent booksellers.

 

New England Review congratulates contributor Lauren Acampora on her debut novel, The Wonder Garden (Grove, 2015). Acampora creates a portrait of a Connecticut suburb through a collection of linked stories that Publisher’s Weekly calls “intelligent, unnerving, and very often strange.”

From the publisher: “A keen and brilliant observer of the strangeness that is American suburbia. Acampora joins the ranks of writers like John Cheever and Tom Perrotta in her incisive portrait of lives intersecting in one Connecticut town . . . Deliciously creepy and masterfully choreographed, The Wonder Garden heralds the arrival of a phenomenal new talent in American fiction.”

Lauren Acampora’s fiction has appeared in NER 27.3 as well as NER Digital, Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. 

Purchase The Wonder Garden from Grove Atlantic or at independent booksellers.

 

“A brace and necessary set of early flares of the literary imagination into the Panopticon we all find ourselves living inside these days.” — Jonathan Lethem

We are excited to announce the publication of Watchlist (OR Books 2015), a collection of short stories about surveillance society edited by NER contributor Bryan Hurt.

Hurt’s work appears in NER 33.2 as well as in American Reader, Kenyon Review, and Tin House, and many others. He has published a novel, Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, and is the winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.

Purchase Watchlist at OR Books or at independent booksellers.