As we transition into the fall season, check out these new and forthcoming titles from our authors!
Devon Walker-Figueroa was the winner of NER’s fourth annual Emerging Writer Award. Her debut collection of poems, Philomath (Milkweed Editions), is the winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and “a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.” With an explorer’s eye, “Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is ‘merely existence carrying on and carrying on.’ In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn’t flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.” The title poem of her collection, “Philomath,” was originally published in NER 38.1
Christopher Sorrentino, author of the novels Trance, The Fugitives, and Sound on Sound, and whose work appeared in NER 26.2, recently released his debut memoir, Now Beacon, Now Sea (Catapult). A intimate meditation on familial grief, the book is “a defining account of what it means to love and lose a difficult parent” and “a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.”
Poet and translator Jennifer Grotz worked with Piotr Sommer to co-translate the selected works of Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski in Everything I Don’t Know (World Poetry Books). Lauded by author Matthew Zapruder as “one of Poland’s best kept secrets,” Jerzy Ficowski’s poems are “a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and ‘shudders / with a tsunami.'” Grotz’s poems and translations have been featured frequently in NER. Two poems from Everything I Don’t Know, “Revolt” and “My Attempted Travels,” have been published in NER 38.2. Read our most recent conversation with Jennifer Grotz and Simone Kraus on the world of translation.
Gabeba Baderoon‘s The History of Intimacy (Triquarterly Books) is “a tender, tangled account of the heady days in South Africa following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. This award-winning poetry collection portrays the innovative forms of music, kinship, and even self in ‘the new, intricate country / we understood was impossible.'” Baderoon’s piece, “Finding and Growing Athlone” was featured in NER 38.4‘s selection of writing from contemporary South African authors.
In Becky Hagenston‘s fourth collection, The Age of Discovery (Mad Creek Books), “the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be.” Hagenston’s short story “Rise” was featured in NER 37.2.
Poet Maggie Smith writes towards the beauty of the present moment in Goldenrod (Atria/One Signal Publishers). “Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment.” The poems in her latest collection “celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.” Smith’s poem, “The Hum” was featured in NER 40.1.
You can find these and other NER authors’ books at our page at Bookshop.org.