Elegant . . . readers will revel in the work’s undeniable beauty and smarts. —Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: These intricately sequenced poems take up everything from animals’ symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change to how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. At the confluence of these poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record–and augment–the beauty of the world in which we live.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the 2014 National Poetry Series, and Forage, forthcoming in 2019, both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way Books, 2012). A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, which she co-edited, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. Rose is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and co-editor-in-chief of Southern Humanities Review. Her work appears most recently in NER 40.1.
Forage can be purchased from Penguin Random House or at your favorite independent bookstore.
Otremba’s command of form and structure, and the scope of his exploration, make this a worthwhile outing. —Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: The poems in Paul Otremba’s Levee explore the intersection between the ecological, the political, and the personal in a world built on oil and greed. The city of Houston is at once backdrop and metaphor for the ways in which violence—both natural and manmade—have become part and parcel of twenty-first century life. “It’s a luxury to be this calm,” Otremba writes in the opening poem, a held-breath between the disastrous effects of hurricanes and cancer. Yet Otremba’s exquisite lines manage to wrest meaning from the devastation wrought by both global warming and a terminal illness: “If there is a lesson / on how not to worry, it’s that you’re not stuck only being one thing, /the multitudes in me and the multitudes in you.”
Paul Otremba is the author of two poetry collections, The Currency (Four Way Books, 2009) and Pax Americana (Four Way Books). His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in such places as Kenyon Review, Witness, Literary Imagination, Southwest Review, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Post, Poetry Daily, and American Poets in the 21 Century: The New Poetics. His work appears in NER 39.3.
Levee can be purchased directly from the publisher, or from your local bookstore.
Before books, the ancients had their memory theaters to treasure and keep in reach all they knew. Eleanor Wilner’s memory theater is a vast and glorious gathering of years of poems that question, deepen, rage, inspire, and connect. Working from myth and history, through grief and edgy expanse, Wilner is our oracle, the generous troubling overvoice of our age, our light, our dark, and our best. —Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief
From the publisher: Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.
Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. In 2019, she received the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, the highest award presented by the Poetry Society of America. Her other awards include the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and her work appears in many anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia. Her work appears in NER 35.4.
Before Our Eyes can be purchased from the publisher or at your local bookstore.
These essays, in addition to being resonant in their own right, will also move readers to recollect stories of their own parents. —Publishers Weekly, starred review
From the publisher: In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree. Twenty-five writers deftly explore a trait they’ve inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today—how it shifts their relationship to that parent (sometimes posthumously) and to their sense of self… Together, their pieces form a prismatic meditation on how we make fresh sense of ourselves and our parents when we see the pieces of them that live on in us.
NER author Angelique Stevens‘s essay is featured in this anthology. Her nonfiction can be found in or is forthcoming in Booth Magazine, Cleaver, Chattahoochee Review, and a number of anthologies. Her essay “All the Grains of Sand” won the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing 2018 grand prize. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and finds her inspiration in wandering—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger. She is currently writing a travel memoir about her trip to South Sudan and her experiences growing up in New York State. Her reflection, “The Only Light We’ve Got,” was published in NER 40.2.
Apple, Tree: Writers on the Their Parents can be purchased from the publisher or at your local bookstore.
Gómez’s deft control of language—the syntax is nimble, the diction is zoetic—brings us close to the boundless resilience that helps us survive, change. —Eduardo C. Corral
From the publisher: In Hijito—selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize—Carlos Andrés Gómez writes of brutality and beauty with the same urgency and with a truth that burns readily; it is a collection of survival instincts. As a vital and tender exploration and deconstruction of contemporary society, his poetry engages with America’s ever-changing landscape and the ways in which race, gender, and violence coalesce. Called “powerful, truthful, and sublime” by Cornel West, Gómez’s words are a necessary paean to hope and courage in the modern world.
Carlos Andrés Gómez‘s is the winner of the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Yale Review, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape(Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Gómez is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poem “Last Sundays at Bootleggers” appears in the current issue of NER (40.2).
Hijito can be purchased online from SPD Books or at your local bookstore.