“[Beattie’s] elegantly sculpted tale is both wrenchingly sad and ultimately enigmatic: as usual.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
From the publisher: A razor-sharp, deeply felt new novel–the twenty-first book by Ann Beattie–about the complicated relationship between a charismatic teacher and his students, and the secrets we keep from those we love. Written by one of our most iconic writers, known for casting a cold eye on her generation’s ambivalence and sometimes mistaken ambition, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is a keenly observed psychological study of a man who alternates between careful driving and hazardous risk taking, as he struggles to incorporate his past into the vertiginous present.
Ann Beattie has published twenty-one books and lives with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, in Maine. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read her story, “Octascope,” which appeared in NER 1.1.
A Wonderful Stroke of Luck can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. [. . .] Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” —Oliver de la Paz
From the publisher: Winner of the James Laughlin Award, Geffrey Davis’s award-winning second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the 1980s crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood.
Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA, 2019), and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and New England Review in NER 39.2. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.
Night Angler can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“Keetje Kuipers’s poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.” —Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Wade in the Water
From the publisher: A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’s decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family—it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010); The Keys to the Jail (2014); and All Its Charms (2019). Kuipers’s poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Best American Poetry, Narrative, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and New England Review in NER 39.2. Kuipers lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea, where she is a faculty member at Seattle’s Hugo House and Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.
All Its Charms can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“Rollins’s debut is a book of dissonance, with race and women’s bodies proving two unyielding concerns throughout this four-part work [. . .] In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent.” —Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins’ ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. “Memory is about the future, not the past,” she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins’ poetry seeks to challenge the status quo, engaging in a diverse, boundary-defying dialogue with an ever-present reminder of the ways race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture collide.
Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as a Librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and New England Review. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Read her poem “Five and a Possible,” featured in NER 39.3.
Library of Small Catastrophes can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“It is difficult to think of a poet writing today who could surpass Marilyn Hacker’s combined formal, sonic and linguistic dexterity… Hacker’s poems reach with both hands towards an intimacy of place, language, knowledge and more.” —Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring Bulletin 2019
From the publisher:
A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation
This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent
poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals
and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in
open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth,
Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab
poets. Hacker’s engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris,
where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking
immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and
broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its
fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume,
Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman’s call for “an internationality of
languages.”
Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris, and has been a regular NER contributor since 1980; most recently, her translation of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen’s poetry was featured in NER 39.4 and new poetry is forthcoming this summer in 40.2.
Blazons can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.