Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties and In The Dream House.
From the publisher: While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.
And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life . . . The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.
Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe. Shapland is a former New England Review intern and graduate of Middlebury College.
My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers can be purchased from Tin House or your local independent bookstore.
[Bibbins’s] Ginsu wit and knack for outing the demons under our skin . . . becomes the perfect tableturning weapon against the culture of mass distraction. ―Boston Review
From the publisher: Mark Bibbins’s book-length poem sequence brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into new light—an account that approximates, with stunning lyricism, “what music sounds like / just before the record skips.” Addressed to a dead beloved, 13th Balloon troubles the cloud-like space of grief by piecing together the fragmented experiences of youth and loss, anguish and desire. Part elegy, part memoir in verse, this is a groundbreaking collection whose trajectory runs counter to the impulse toward nostalgia, unearthing what was thought to have burned in the fire.
Mark Bibbins is the author of three books with Copper Canyon including 13th Balloon; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, named one of the best poetry collections of 2014 by Publishers Weekly; and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, The New School, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003), and was a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. His work has appeared in NER 29.4 and 34.2.
13th Balloon can be purchased from Copper Canyon Press or at your local bookstore.
This fifth and most daring book yet sings deeply, solemn and vulnerable, a blues for our times. —Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest
From the publisher: In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.
Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism.
Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He has edited Best American Poetry 2019 and is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson lives Vermont where he is a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. Jackson read at NER‘s Vermont Reading Series in 2013.
The Absurd Man can be purchased from W. W. Norton or at your local bookstore.
Every poem seems made to steady and fortify him against mortality. —Dan Chiasson of the New Yorker
From the publisher: Survival is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought . . . one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.
Christian Wiman is the author of two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (FSG, 2018); Every Riven Thing (FSG, 2010), winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry; Once in the West (FSG, 2014), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in poetry; and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in NER 21.1, 24.1, and 30.2.
Survival is a Style can be purchased from Macmillan or at your local bookstore.