This is a worthy volume in Lock’s American Novels series, and readers will find him to be an ideal guide for a trip into the past. –Publishers Weekly
NER author Norman Lock has recently published the third book in The American Novels series. In The Port-Wine Stain he imagines a mentoring relationship between Edgar Allen Poe and a young writer, which Lock describes as a “dark enchantment.”
In the series’ first two installments, Lock explored fictional narratives centered around Huck Finn (The Boys in His Winter, Bellevue Literary Press, 2014), and American westward expansion (American Meteor, Bellevue, 2015). NPR has said that his work “shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” Lock’s fiction has appeared frequently in NER, including 23.4, 28.3, and 34.2.
The Port-Wine Stain is available from Bellevue Literary Press and independent booksellers.
Kim Addonizio’s voice lifts from the page, alive and biting—unleashing wit with a ruthless observation.
—San Francisco Book Review
From the publisher: Passionate and irreverent, Kim Addonizio‘s Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire…. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.
Addonizio’s poetry was published most recently in NER 36.3. Mortal Trash is available from W.W. Norton and Co. and other booksellers.
From the publisher: Governor General’s Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton returns with a collection of laments and celebrations that reflect on our struggle to believe in the future of a world that continues to disappoint us. The poet challenges the boundaries of sleep and even death in these meditations on what lies just beneath the surface of contemporary life. These are poems that trouble over the idea of failure even as they continually recommit to the present moment. This is fierce music performed in a minor key.
Heighton’s short story “Shared Room on Union” was published in NER 35.1. The Waking Comes Late is available in print and digital from House of Anansi Press and other booksellers.
A witty and elegiac new collection from the author of “exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful” verse. —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
From the publisher: The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York’s Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts—of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Cate Marvin‘s haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.
Marvin’s poems have appeared frequently in NER. Most recently, her poem “High School in Suzhou” has been published in NER 36.1 and recited at NER Out Loud. Oracle is available in print from W.W. Norton and Co. and other booksellers.