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“Exceptional . . . Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
From the publisher: After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.
Victoria Chang’s books include Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love Love, will be published by Sterling Publishing in 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. You can listen to Chang’s most recent poems with NER, “Obit—Memory,” “Obit—Music,” and “Obit—Grief,” here: NER 38.3.
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“There is nothing like this book.” —Stephen Scully, author of Homer and the Sacred City
From the publisher: Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.
Stephanie Burt is a poet and critic and professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include Don’t Read Poetry, Advice from the Lights: Poems, and the essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in such publications as the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. She serves as poetry coeditor for the Nation. Her essay, “Skating with Delmore,” is forthcoming from NER this June.
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“Reading this book feels like some cosmic bang is conjuring up gravity inside your own brain, but whoa it was actually just John Gallaher who did that and he only used his words.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue
From the publisher: In Brand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about what fades and what remains. These poems offer snapshots of the poet’s memories of his adoption and childhood, his father’s heart attacks, his mother’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments. With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.
John Gallaher is the author of In A Landscape (BOA, 2014), and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), which received the Levis Poetry Prize. He is also the co-author with G. C. Waldrep of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA, 2011), which was written in collaboration almost entirely through email. He is currently the co-editor of The Laurel Review and The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. He lives in Marysville, Missouri, where he is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University. You can read Gallaher’s most recent poem with NER, “Addenda to Your Emergency Plan,” in NER 36.3.
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“Every sense engaged, each filament of intellect glowing, memory fully aflame—it’s not easy to survive such aliveness.” —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
From the publisher: In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.
William Fargason is the winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018–2019 Kingsbury Fellowship. He earned a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida. Fargason’s poems “Aquarium” and “Birthmark” appear in NER 35.1.
Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!
“Each stanza has a heuristic brilliance” —Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From the publisher: Insofar is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A–Z filing system. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others. Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses.
Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry collections include Weather Eye Open (University of California Press); Green is the Orator (University of California Press); and Loom (Omnidawn). She has a BA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. The title poem of Insofar was first published in NER 38.3 and can be read here.
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“Chatti turns fear and shame into empowerment in her unflinching debut” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
From the publisher: In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare” appears in NER 38.2.
Deluge can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!
“The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score where superstition is prelude and memory is encore . . . Torres [pieces] together the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does through the veins in a leaf.”
—Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Hour of the Ox
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry. Hersecond collection, What Happens Is Neither, is forthcoming from Four Way Books (March 2021). Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and PANK. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She received First Prize in the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York). New City magazine named her one of Chicago’s Lit 50 in 2016. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in South Florida. In 2020, she joins the conference faculty of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry, and sat until recently on the editorial panel at NER.
To The Bone is available for FREE download at Sundress Publications. Preorder a signed print copy here.
All proceeds to benefit RAICES, a nonprofit organization providing free or low cost legal services to refugees, immigrants, and their families.
“Fiona Sampson’s voice is something new and it’s a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read”— W. S. Merwin
From the publisher: Throughout, Sampson’s poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond – some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present.
Fiona Sampson has published twenty-nine books, most recently a critically acclaimed biography In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), and received a number of national and international awards for poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she’s received an MBE for services to literature, and been published in thirty-seven languages. She now lives in an old farm in a valley on the Welsh borders. Her poetry will appear in NER 42.1 (June, 2020).
Come Down can be purchased from Waterstones.