Ahmed’s style of writing is simple yet powerful. She writes with honesty and compassion for each of the characters compelling the readers in kind, to empathise with their situations and plight. —The Indo-American Arts Council
From the publisher: In 1940s Calcutta, the young and lovely Yasmine Khan is the doyenne of the nightclub scene. When the US sets up a large army base in her city to fight the Japanese in Burma, Yasmine spots an opportunity—her Bombay Duck will be Calcutta’s answer to the wartime bars of London and Paris.
In luminous, incisive prose, Ahmed examines the inequities wrought by racism and colonialism. Dust Under Her Feet is a wartime tale like no other.
Sharbari Zohra Ahmed is the author of two books: a novel, Dust Under Her Feet (Amazon India/Westland Publishing, 2019), and a short story collection, The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories (Daily Star Books, 2013). She was on the writing team for season one of the TV Series, Quanticoon ABC. Her play Raisins Not Virgins will be produced as part of New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door 2020 season. Her fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Catamaran, Caravan Magazine, Inroads, Wasafiri, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Roanoke Review. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and Artist in Residence in the Film and Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University. Her story “The Length in Six Strokes” is forthcoming in NER 40.3.
Dust Under Her Feet can be purchased here.
From the publisher: lucida intervalla is a Latin phrase describing one of those startling “lucid intervals” experienced by the insane. Lucida Intervalla, as imagined by John Kinsella―the Australian poet and novelist―is an art journalist, artist, and social media sensation whose brilliant presence beguiles every one around her.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world scarcely distinguishable from our own, Kinsella’s new novel follows her exploits and thoughts about art, political protest, eternity, and the absolute. At once a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas whose prose echoes everything from Søren Kierkegaard to Twitter, Lucida Intervalla may well be Kinsella’s masterpiece.
John Kinsella is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, and has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards, including a Fellowship from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council. His work can be found in NER 36.1, and his translation, From Aftering Delmore Schwartz‘s “A Season in Hell” is forthcoming this fall in NER 40.3.
Lucida Intervalla can be purchased from the publisher here. Also available in an American edition by Dalkey Archive Press.
In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty.
Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation’s name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa’s writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.
Khaled Mattawa currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. His latest book of poems is Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010). A MacArthur Fellow, he is the editor of Michigan Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in NER several times, most recently in NER 40.1.
Mare Nostrum can be purchased from the publisher here.
Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes, in Sharon Dolin’s beautiful translation, is by far the best book of prose poems I have read in the past decade. Like a house mirror, each prose poem here “retains the memory of all the souls who have gazed at themselves inside it.” The result is spellbinding and surprising, as the voice of these poems searches for the mystery within the mundane.—Ilya Kominsky, author of Deaf Republic
From the publisher: The poems in Book of Minutes move seamlessly from philosophical speculation to aphorism, condensed narrative, brief love letter, and prayer, finding the metaphysical in even the most mundane. In the space of one or two paragraphs, they ponder God, love, language, existence, and beginnings and endings both large and small. In her openness to explore these and many other subjects, Gorga’s leitmotif might well be “light.” Carrying with them echoes of Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hans Christian Andersen, Francis Ponge, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson, the poems in Book of Minutes are nonetheless firmly in the twenty-first century, moving in a single breath from the soul to diopters or benzodiazepine. In deft, idiomatic translation from Sharon Dolin, Book of Minutes also retains the original Catalan texts on facing pages.
Gemma Gorga has published six collections of poetry, most recently Mur (Barcelona, 2015), which won the Premi de la Crítica de Poesia Catalana for the best book of poetry published in Catalan for that year. Her work appears in NER 37.1.
Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). Her work appears in NER 37.1.
Book of Minutes can be purchased at your local, independent bookstore or directly from the publisher.
A darkly cutting investigation of dysfunction in which the kids, more often than not, are way sharper than the parents —Kirkus starred review
From the publisher: Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four—the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy—in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
Anthony Varallo is the author of four short story collections, most recently Everyone Was There. He is professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina. His work appears in NER 28.2.
The Lines can be found at your local bookstore, or purchased from the University of Iowa Press.
Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world… What really glitters, of course, are the words themselves, radiant particulars in a world that is mostly inhospitable and bleak. —Mark Rudman, London Review of Books
From the publisher: One Lark, One Horse is a remarkable assemblage of work that will delight loyal readers and enchant new ones with Michael Hofmann’s approachable, companionable voice. In style, [Hofmann’s] voice is as unmistakable as ever—sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate—and this collection shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European and American imaginations. The poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as aging and memory, place, and the difficult existence of the individual in an ever-bigger and more bestial world.
Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. FSG has published his Selected Poems, his book of prose, Where Have You Been? Selected Essays, his anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry, and his translations of Gottfried Genn and Durs Grünbein. He teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida. His translation of Joseph Roth’s “Stationmaster Fallmerayer” appears in NER 23.1.
One Lark, One Horse can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local, independent bookstore.
In Threshold Delivery, Patty Seyburn’s wit is gorgeously, ruthlessly inventive—death-harrowed and hope-shaded; it is deployed not for its own sake, but in the service of a moment when mortal truths break a poem, and us, wide open. —Dorothy Barresi, author of What We Did While We Made More Guns
From the publisher: Threshold Delivery takes a lyrical look at mortality, exploring, with pathos and humor, the intersection between personal history and cultural inheritance, risk and responsibility, and the flow of absence and presence—including, at the Mah Jongg table.
Patty Seyburn is a professor at California State University, Long Beach. Her previous books are Perfecta (What Books Press, 2014), Hilarity (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998).
Threshold Delivery can be purchased from the publisher here!