Hares are “unusually shy and wild in spring, which is their rutting season,” explains Brewer’s Book of Phrase and Fable in explicating the idiom “mad as a March hare.” The brown hare on the cover of the new NER—shipping now from the printer—beckons readers to explore this mad and wild season with the 29 writers and translators whose work is just now finding its way into print.

In the warrens of this issue’s nonfiction, Kim McLarin chronicles her lifelong struggle as a Black woman in a country that does not love her back; Sherrie Flick reports on a pink house in the Slopes of Pittsburgh; and Xu Xi looks back on decades in the workforce, through the lens of iconic lines of fiction. Mark Harman follows Borges as he navigates Joyce’s Ulysses, and Terry Eicher translates, for the first time into English, an essay on poetry by the founding president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Also included are two works of lyric nonfiction by Sara Michas-Martin and Robert Anthony Siegel.

Stories include speculative fiction by C. P. Boyko and an exploration of method acting and archaeology by Alyssa Pelish. Castle Freeman Jr. offers a vignette from Vermont, and emerging writer Rob Franklin imagines what happens when an out-of-work writer shows up at the home of his hero. Featured also is an excerpt from a new novel by Ana Ménendez, set in a mice-infested art-deco building in South Miami Beach.

In poetry are two new works by our 2016 Emerging Writer Award–winner Hai-Dang Phan, and translations of Anzhelina Polonskaya and Marina Tsvetaeva. Sally Wen Mao presents a series of concrete poems; Rosalie Moffett explores the hysterosalpingography and the exclamation point; and Megan Fernandes offers a short take on Rilke. Other poets in the new issue include Tammy Armstrong, Justin Balog, Wo Chan, Niki Herd, Steven Kleinman, Lisa Williams, and Keith S. Wilson.

See the full table of contents here, and order a copy of the current issue today in print or ebook, or—better yet—subscribe and support NER all year long!