Search Results for: Sarah audsley

New Books by NER Authors

Winter 2022-2023

February 22, 2023

Looking to curl up and get cozy with a good book? You’re in luck! This winter, we’ve collected nine new books from NER contributors, including four novels, four poetry collections, and a short story collection. Don’t forget to shop these titles on our Bookshop.org page.

Pegasus Press recently published Henriette Lazaridis’s Terra Nova. Lazaridis’s other work has appeared in Elle, The New York Times, The Millions, and Pangyrus. She founded The Drum, a literary magazine, and is a graduate of Middlebury College. Her short story “Chess Lessons” appeared in NER 27.3.

This winter, we’re returning to Sara Eliza Johnson’s Vapor, published last year from Milkweed Books. This poetry collection explores the urgency of human emotion through a glacial landscape. Johnson, a National Poetry Series winner, is the author of Bone Map. Her poem “Migration” appeared in NER 40.2.

Out now from Elixir Press is Kirk Wilson’s short story collection Out of Season, the winner of the 2021 Elixir Press Fiction Award. Among other awards, Wilson has received two Pushcart nominations and an NEA fellowship. “Banquo’s Ghost,” a short story from the collection, was originally published in NER 41.3.

Hot off the press from Tin House Books is Gabrielle Bates’s arresting debut poetry collection, Judas Goat. Vulture‘s review of the collection describes Bates as “a wise, tender witness to the parts of ourselves we rarely expose.” Her poem “Anniversary” appeared in issue 38.2.

It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter, released on February 7th from Deep Vellum. Meduza called the novel “one of the main—if not the main—book of this year.” Gorbunova and Alter previously collaborated on “Biomass,” which appeared in NER 39.2.

Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, dropped earlier this month from Texas A&M University Press. Audsley’s work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Pleiades. Her poem “Field Dress Portal” appeared in NER 41.4. She speaks about the poem in the NER Digital piece “Writer’s Notebook – Field Dress Portal.”

Viking Books has just released Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, I Have Some Questions for You. Makkai is the author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers. TIME, NPR, USA Today, Elle, and others named “I Have Some Questions for You” as a Most Anticipated Book of 2023. Makkai’s short story “The Briefcase” was published in NER 29.2.

Melinda Moustakis’s Homestead will be out on February 28th from Flatiron Books. Moustakis is a Flannery O’Connor Award and O. Henry Prize winner, and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Selection. Her work has been published in American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Homestead is her debut novel. Moustakis’s short story “What You Can Endure” was featured in NER 32.1.

Collected Poems, the definitive collection of Ellen Bryant Voigt‘s five-decade career, is out now from W. W. Norton. Voigt has been described as “a quintessential American elegist” by the Kenyon Review and “one of the most significant poets writing today” by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work has appeared in multiple volumes of NER, most recently in issue 39.3.

Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

February 1, 2021

Sarah Audsley photo by Anne Skidmore — Sarah Audsley, photo by Anne Skidmore

Do poets always feel envious of painters? Do painters ever envy poets? “Field Dress Portal” (NER 41.4) was not begun out of envy but out of admiration for the painting Field Dress by Lauren Woods. However, I would be lying if I did not admit to often being envious of my friends who are painters. With layers of color from an invented palette, the artist’s perception of the world is realized; sometimes, it seems like an easier task than the poet’s. I am making assumptions. Of course, I do not believe that either the painter or the poet ever endeavors because it is an easy task. Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

The ekphrastic poem has always eluded me. In graduate school, I failed to respond to a writing prompt by one of my favorite mentors. I never really tried again until this poem because, I think, the ekphrastic poem intimidates me. At its heart, I understand that ekphrasis—defined by The Oxford Classical Dictionary as “the rhetorical description of a work of art”—is supposed to describe and respond to a work of art beginning with the poet’s description. But how does one adhere to the mode’s expectations and, possibly, transcend the pitfall of mere description?

My response to Woods’s painting evolved over time, almost along with the artist’s reworking of her canvas. I watched the pictures of her progress on social media, the painting morphing over the course of several months. Revisions of the poem did not exactly follow the changes the painter made, but I reworked many drafts from August 2019 to the final proof for NER.

I wanted to step into the painting—to feel the tree limbs underfoot, to imagine inhabiting the lighted landscape the painter created, to understand the forest in a new way. A painting is 2-D, but how can words make it 3-D? I hope this poem enlivens the painting, creates a portal for the reader, encourages looking up the original artwork, and for the question the poem asks to be worthy of the leap. Also, I am aware that I cannot use the phrase “dead doe” without evoking “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, which, in my opinion, is inimitable—I bow down before her and her genius. Perhaps Woods’s painting reminded me of Kelly’s poem. And, in that regard, Noah Stezer’s poem “For All the Deer” in Sixth Finch provides another lens to ruminate on deer poems.

Most importantly, though, I consider myself a “rural poet.” What I mean by that self-designation is that I claim belonging in the rural landscape—Vermont, specifically—as a Korean American adoptee. Seeing someone like myself represented in a rural or wild landscape was not common when I was growing up. I claim the pastoral. The poem’s speaker’s identity is not disclosed, but it is important for the “I” to take up the rural descriptions, to walk through the painting, to make my own portal of belonging with words.

Contributors’ Notes 41.4

Tommy Archuleta is a mental health and substance abuse counselor for the New Mexico Corrections Department. His work has appeared in the Laurel Review, Pleiades, Guesthouse, El Palacio, Pasatiempo, and the Poem-a-Day series sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.

Sarah Audsley has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Noah Baldino is a writer and editor. Their poems can be found in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. They currently live in St. Louis.

Sindya Bhanoo’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Granta, Masters Review, and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection is forthcoming (Catapult, 2020). She was the 2020 disquiet Literary Prize winner and has received support from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. A frequent contributor to the New York Times and Washington Post, Bhanoo is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Michener Center for Writers. She is currently a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Noah Bogdonoff is a writer and social worker based out of Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to New England Review, his writing has previously appeared in Passages North, Carve Magazine, Catapult, Strange Horizons, Pleiades, and the Believer.

Conor Bracken is the author of the chapbook Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017) and translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His first book of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me, will be published by Diode Editions in 2021. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Frost Place, Inprint, and Sewanee, he is an assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review and lives and teaches in Ohio.

Ryan Dennis is a former Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing and has taught creative writing at several universities. He is the founder of The Milk House, a rural writing collective. In addition to being published in various literary journals, he is a syndicated columnist for agricultural and rural life magazines. His first novel, The Beasts They Turned Away, will be published by Epoque Press in early 2021.

Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of African, American (New Delta Review, 2019) and two self-published collections. He has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell, and his work has been featured on/in the New York Times, Write About Now, Houston Public Media, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Texas Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a student at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

Zack Finch’s work has appeared in journals including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Jacket2, Poetry, Radical Society, and Tin House. He has been a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and currently teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the northern Berkshires.

Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, he has published his work in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets, the New York City Ballet, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Emily Hunt Kivel is a writer who splits her time between Texas and New York. Her short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Washington Square Review, Vol. I Brooklyn, and others.

Romana Iorga is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian. Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, she lives in Switzerland. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, American Literary Review, Harpur Palate, PANK, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

Vida James is a Nuyorican social worker from Brooklyn, New York, where she supported immigrant and homeless youth. She is a Delaney Fellow at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers. She was a 2018 VONA/Voices fellow and her work has previously appeared in Epiphany and PANK. She is working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Ji Hyun Joo is a writer from San Diego based in Astoria, New York. She is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she is a recipient of the 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship. Her works have been published in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s online magazine the Margins, the online publication Winter Tangerine, and the journal Bomb Cyclone.

Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbooks Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017) and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). His work received a 2020 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets, Crazyhorse, KROnline, Pleiades, and Tin House, among others. LaBerge is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Adroit Journal, as well as an MFA candidate and Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. For more, visit www.peterlaberge.com.

Ralph Lazar was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and holds degrees in law and economics from the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. His art, which he creates in real-time as the news unfolds, documents recurring themes including race relations, civil rights, US presidential history, the US Supreme Court, and the US Constitution. He has shown his work across the country, including on 1,700 LinkNYC digital screens across New York in pre-pandemic 2020, and his awards and nominations have come from around the world. He lives with his wife and children in Marin County, California. See more at www.ralphlazar.com.

Ae Hee Lee was born in South Korea and raised in Peru. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Southeast Review, Poetry, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and the Adroit Journal, among others. She is the author of two chapbooks: Bedtime // Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017) and Dear Bear (Platypus Press, 2021).

Hael Lopez is the author of Rutinas/Despedidas (Sion Editorial, 2018). Born in 1994 in Guatemala City, she now lives in El Tejar, Chimaltenango. Lopez is studying sociology and has been featured in readings and festivals in Guatemala City, Chimaltenango, Sumpango, and Xela. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming (in translation) in Empty Mirror, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

Cate Lycurgus’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2020, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Boston Review, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. She has also received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and was named one of Narrative’s 30 Under 30 Featured Writers. Lycurgus lives south of San Francisco, California, where she interviews for 32 Poems and teaches professional writing. You can find her at www.catelycurgus.com.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows is a writer of English, German, and Cherokee ancestry, born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains. An AWP Intro Journals Project winner, he has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, Colorado Creative Industries, National Association for Interpretation, and University of Denver, where he is working toward his PhD.

Jordan Nakamura is a writer born and raised in Hawaii and living in South Central, Los Angeles. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University and his writing, interviews, and articles have appeared in the Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Zócalo Public Square, Lunch Ticket, and the Curator Magazine.

Lydia Paar holds an MFA from Washington University and an MA from Northern Arizona University. Her work was selected by Alexander Chee as the 2020 winner of North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize. She was the recipient of a Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation Fellowship and a Millay Colony for the Arts Residency. Previous work has appeared in Essay Daily, Alligator Juniper, Five: 2: One, and Manzano Mountain Review, and is also forthcoming in the Missouri Review. She can be reached at www.lydiapaar.com.

Sebastián Hasani Páramo is a CantoMundo Fellow. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Salamander, TriQuarterly, KROnline, and Blackbird, among others. He is the founding editor of the boiler. He has received scholarships and awards from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and the Vermont Studio Center. He holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of North Texas and will be the 2021 Jesse H. Jones Fellow through the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program, sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Ben Peled has an MFA from NYU. He lives in Brooklyn with his beautiful wife and their needy cat. His work has been published in Fugue and the Antioch Review.

Samyak Shertok’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2020 National Poetry Series finalist, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He also received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2020.

Tyler Sones received his MFA from Ohio State in 2019. His work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Pacifica, Hobart, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Billie Swift is the author of the chapbook Everything Here (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). She lives in Seattle, Washington, where she is the owner and operator of Open Books: A Poem Emporium.

C. A. Traywick is a journalist based in Denver, Colorado.

Dylan Weir is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has published his poems in Florida Review, Meridian, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Salt Hill, Sycamore Review, and others.

Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020)

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EDITOR’S NOTE

POETRY
CONOR BRACKEN If the Body Is a Miracle
SEBASTIÁN HASANI PÁRAMO Blood & Breath
AE HEE LEE Asterism / When a Language Is Said to Be Lost / Self-Portrait as I
PETER LABERGE White Orchid
BILLIE SWIFT The history maker / While We Go On
ROMANA IORGA What I Learned About Shadow
JORDAN NAKAMURA Exposure
NOAH BALDINO Roughhousing / It’s not your birthday
DYLAN WEIR Disease Theory
SARAH AUDSLEY Field Dress Portal
CATE LYCURGUS & Stasis Is a Hopeful Way
TOMMY ARCHULETA Susto
HAEL LOPEZ Anticipation/Somatization
trans. Ariel Francisco
SAMYAK SHERTOK Heirloom
AYOKUNLE FALOMO Alive in the Age of Worry

FICTION
EMILY HUNT KIVEL Restful Creatures
VIDA JAMES Storm King
NOAH BOGDONOFF Blue
JI HYUN JOO Queen’s Luxury Spa
TYLER SONES A Cool, Dry Place
SINDYA BHANOO No. 16 Model House Road
BEN PELED Knights of Columbus
C. A. TRAYWICK Femicide

NONFICTION
Reports from American Places
LUCIEN DARJEUN MEADOWS Circling Eloh: A Meditation
LYDIA PAAR Murder City – shared on Literary Hub

Reckonings
ZACK FINCH The Village Beautiful
RYAN DENNIS Naming Fields: The Loss of Narrative in Farming

Rediscoveries
CARL VAN DOREN On Hating the Provinces

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

COVER ART Ralph Lazar

New England Review