New England Review

New Books by NER Authors

Late-Summer Poetry Collections

“Corral nimbly bridges the personal and political, evoking themes of migration to ask what it means to be unwanted.”—New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy

From the publisher: Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?

Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He was a founding fellow of the CantoMundo Writers Conference, and recipient of a Whiting Award. He teaches at North Carolina State University. His poem “Watermark” appeared in NER 30.4. 

Guillotine can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Here is a particular heart and mind removing its shield in order to commune, to help us see the world again, more deeply and more strangely, and reader, I am grateful.”—Allison Benis White, author of The Wendy’s

From the publisher: Took House is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. In vulnerable poems of obsession, Camp places motivation deep in the background, following instead a chain reaction between pain and pleasure. Took House navigates a landscape of bone and ash, wine and circumstance. Boundaries shift between reality and allegory. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.

Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections. One Hundred Hungers, Camp’s third book, won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, Tupelo’s most prestigious poetry prize. Previous books have been shortlisted for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and the New Mexico- Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet ore, Slice, DIAGRAM and elsewhere, and many have been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish. Her poem “Winter of Tumult and Artifact” appeared in NER 36.4.

Took House can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“In prose so rapt with noticing you can almost believe the page remembers the tree it was. This is the poet’s final blessing: to hold the precious world in two good hands and say goodbye.”—Linda Gregerson, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of The Selvage

From the publisher:After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance—looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends—the relationships that sustained him throughout his life—as well as unflinching self-portraits.lending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly’s life.

Stanley Plumly (1939—2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Old Heart. He was also the author of four books of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes and The Immortal Evening, winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. His other honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018. His poetry has appeared in NER many times over the years, most recently in issue 40.1.

Middle Distance can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Nezhukumatathil is the environmental writer we should be reading in schools, instead of Emerson or Thoreau.” ―The New Southern Fugitives

From the publisher: From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Read her poem “The Two” in NER 34.3-4. 

World of Wonders can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

New episode of NER Out Loud

George Szirtes, Joannie Stangeland, & Angelique Stevens

photo of Simone with microphone in front of yellow painted farmhouse type wall.
Simone Edgar Holmes hosts the NER podcast

Episode 11 of the NER Out Loud podcast has been released! Created, edited, and hosted by summer intern Simone Edgar Holmes, this episode presents George Szirtes, Joannie Stangeland, and Angelique Stevens reading their own work from New England Review.

From her remote-work address in Charlotte, Vermont, Simone brings together the voices of NER authors from Wymondham, England; Seattle, Washington; and Rochester, New York.

Listen in as George Szirtes reads his poem “English Rain,” Joannie Stangeland reads her poem “Parcel,” and Angelique Stevens reads from her memoir “The Only Light We’ve Got”

You can stream the NER Out Loud podcast from our website or Soundcloud. Or download from iTunes and subscribe.

Behind the Byline

Ryan Eric Dull

A character type I find myself writing a lot is Person with nothing concrete at the center of their life, who, in their hunger for meaning, grabs ahold of a shaky set of principles / practices / ambitions and refuses to let go.

Author Ryan Eric Dull talks with NER fiction reader Andrew Kane about writing “The Corridor” (NER 41.2), which included “a lot of time pressed up against the wall trying to figure it out.”

Andrew Kane: This story is so thoroughly unexpected—it begins with the protagonist, Alex, relocating from Baltimore to Providence, and ends with him slathered in peanut oil, nude but for a belt, with enough food and water to survive several days inside an eight-inch-wide crevice. How did the idea for this piece come to be? Did it arrive more or less fully formed, or were extensive brainstorming and revisions necessary?

Ryan Eric Dull: The central idea kind of dropped from the ceiling. My wife wondered aloud why someone on social media was trying to lose weight and I said, “Maybe he’s trying to get through a really tight hallway,” which struck me as a funny thing to get passionate about, to be looking at this hallway every day thinking, “Soon.” From there, it was all step-by-step logical chain stuff: What kind of person does he need to be to end up wanting this so badly? What needs to be true about the building that it has this weird, barely usable hallway? The building renovations paralleled Alex’s self-transformation in a way that felt interesting, so I tried to make those elements dovetail. I wrote the first draft for a workshop (thanks again to Ben Loory and that whole group! Can I do shout-outs here? If so, my wife from a few sentences ago is named Allison) and I didn’t have a lot of time, so it was a lot of writing impulsively, letting one idea chase the next, that kind of thing. By this process, I gradually turned a spontaneous goof into a studied, laborious goof.

AK: There is a wonderful sense of physicality throughout the story, ranging from comical to terrifying—the scene where Alex becomes briefly stuck in the corridor reminded me of nothing so much as the starkest passages from James Salter’s rock-climbing novel Solo Faces. What was your vision for the overall tone of the piece? Was there any specific goal you hoped to achieve by working in the space between these modes?

RED: I’m glad the physicality works! I spent a lot of time pressed up against the wall trying to figure it out. Generally, I don’t think about tone in an instrumental way—I usually have a kind of intuitive sense of how I want the story to feel and then I orient all of the elements toward that feeling. In this case, I think the core concept of the story is so goofy that I had to keep the tone pretty earnest or it would have felt weightless. Maybe there’s a way to tell this story where Alex faces a little more ridicule from other characters and from the story itself, so the reader is a little more alienated from him and experiences the story more analytically. That could be interesting. But I wanted to take him seriously, which meant the struggle had to be genuinely arduous and the hallway had to be genuinely menacing. And of course treating something really undeniably silly with a lot of gravity creates kind of a funny dissonance for the reader, so everything feels heightened and strange. Ideally, I want to create an atmosphere where every sentence could plausibly end with a joke or a life-altering disaster.

AK: The character of Alex emerges in surprising ways. On the one hand, he willingly accepts his fairly dull workaday job; on the other, a primary reason for his return to Providence is that he remembers it as “alive with passionate intention”—certainly something he regains, though perhaps not in the way he had expected. What was it that drew you to writing this particular character, and how were you able to fully explore a protagonist whose primary arc is concerned with training to shimmy through a very tight space?

RED: A character type I find myself writing a lot is “Person with nothing concrete at the center of their life, who, in their hunger for meaning, grabs ahold of a shaky set of principles/practices/ambitions and refuses to let go.” Alex is reminiscing about a moment in his life where everyone around him had just finished the really purposeful, goal-oriented experience of formal education and was trying to ride that momentum into the rest of their lives. Now he’s becoming aware, without a lot of real understanding, that he never settled on any stable source of meaning, so he’s kind of drifting through his life, totally vulnerable to anything that can give him a sense of purpose. This is a pretty extreme version of that character type—he has to be searching so frantically with so little success or direction that this hallway adventure seems like a strong option. And once he’s invested, it’s like any other big ambition: he studies it, he approaches it from different angles, he arrives over and over again at junctures where he might reasonably decide it’s not worth the trouble, and every time he chooses to press ahead, he invests more of himself into the project, he makes it more and more this grand, totemic thing that has very little to do with his concrete goal and a lot to do with the heat of the ambition itself, everything else in his life is either incorporated into the ambition or discarded, and eventually he douses himself in peanut oil.

AK: The story walks a fine line between the straight-faced and the absurd, and the dialogue follows suit—a single spoken line can feel at once comical and vaguely sinister. Do you have a particular process for writing dialogue that feels so alive and believable on the page?

RED: Oh! My process is: I talk to myself a lot. I stage a scene in my head and kind of improvise through it over and over again and make a lot of dramatic facial expressions. When a phrase starts to feel resonant, I’ll iterate on that for a while and eventually write it down. This technique is easier to practice at home than at the library.

AK: Do you see this story as being part of a particular tradition of fiction writing? Who are some authors who have had an impact on you, either for this piece specifically or else as a writer in general?

RED: One possible influence for this piece that sticks out in my mind: I’d recently read the Brian Evenson story “Watson’s Boy,” which is about a family living a very narrow, ritualistic life in a labyrinth that is never explained or justified to the reader. It’s a real “begin with a blank space, then add a few elements” kind of story where the whole narrative universe is a handful of people in a fixed space, and it really drives home the lesson that any narrative circumstance can be visceral and affecting as long as the writer takes the characters’ experiences seriously. For a while after I read it, I was treating weird, implausible ideas for stories with a deeper respect. I probably wouldn’t have written this story if I hadn’t read that one. I definitely wouldn’t have written it so earnestly. Some other big names for me are Karen Joy Fowler, Steven Millhauser, Charles Portis, and Karen Russell, whose impact is maybe kind of traceable in this story, and Samuel R. Delany, Ted Chiang, E. L. Doctorow, and Annie Dillard, whose impact here is probably just about invisible.

Ryan Eric Dull lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in the Missouri Review and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and is upcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Andrew Kane is a writer and editor currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He writes for NPR’s Ask Me Another, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Rumpus, Rupture, the Normal School, Rattle, and elsewhere.

August 2020

New Books by NER Authors

“This is a jewel of a book.” —Ian McEwan

From the publisher: In 1971 Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a “visiting Latin American writer” while he attended to business in London. He agreed–and that “writer” turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Jorge Luis Borges. About whom Jay Parini knew precisely nothing. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must “see,” all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini’s eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate.

Jay Parini is a poet, biographer, and critic who has published seven novels, most notably The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film in 2009 and translated into over twenty-five languages. He is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, and the author of Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America. Listen to him read his essay “A Beer With Borges” (NER 39.1) in Episode 5 of NER Out Loud. 

Borges and Me can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Exacting, hilarious, and deadly . . . A writer of exhilarating freedom and daring.” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Bazaar

From the publisher: Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties–sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She’s also, secretly, haltingly, figuring her way into life as an artist. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage–with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and falling into Eric’s family life, his home. She becomes a hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only black woman who young Akila knows.

Raven Leilani‘s work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Narrative, Yale Review, Conjunctions, and the Cut, among others. She won Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest and the Matt Clark Editor’s Choice Prize, as well as short fiction prizes from Bat City Review and Blue Earth Review. Luster is her first novel. Her story “Dead Weight” appeared in NER 39.3. Read her conversation with NER fiction reader Michael Webster Thompson here. 

Luster can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“[Quinn’s] voice is at once poetic and scientific—exactly what we need in today’s overheated world.” —David Gessner, author of Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness

From the publisher: Sign Here If You Exist explores states of being and states of mind, from the existence of God to sense of place to adoptive motherhood. In it, Jill Sisson Quinn examines how these states both disorient and anchor us as she treks through forests, along shorelines, and into lakes and rivers as well as through memories and into scientific literature. Each essay hinges on an unlikely pairing—parasitic wasps and the afterlife, or salamanders and parenthood—in which each element casts the other in an unexpectedly rich light. Quinn joins the tradition of writers such as Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Eula Biss to deliver essays that radiate from the junction of science and imagination, observation and introspection, and research and reflection.

Jill Sisson Quinn’s essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, OnEarth, and many other magazines. She has received the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Her work has been reprinted in Best American Science & Nature Writing 2011. Her first book, Deranged, was published by Apprentice House of Loyola University Maryland in 2010. A regular commentator for Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life series, she lives and writes in Scandinavia, Wisconsin. An essay from this collection, “Big Night,” appeared in NER 36.1 and was selected for the 2016 Best American Essays. 

Sign Here If You Exist can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

Matthew Baker’s mind is an oyster producing pearl after pearl. Each story in Why Visit America offers an eerie and unsettling vision of our possible future while remaining emotionally truthful and, as always, incredibly damn fun.”
—Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under

From the publisher: The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America.

 Matthew Baker is the author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures and the Edgar Award-nominated children’s novel If You Find This. He was named one of Variety‘s “10 Storytellers To Watch” and his fiction has appeared in publications including the Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Conjunctions, and Best Of The Net. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City. His stories have appeared in NER issues 33.2 and 35.4. 

Why Visit America can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

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