New England Review

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New Books from NER Authors

April 2022

April 23, 2022

Happy National Poetry Month! We’re celebrating with five new poetry collections by NER authors (and maybe some captivating prose, too!)

By tapping into the metaphysical, the ekphrastic, the sensual, and the ordinary moments of life, Erika Meitner’s newest collection Useful Junk (BOA Editions) provides a stunning exploration of memory, passion, desire, and intimacy. These poems assert that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, reminding us that deeply-rooted desires are what keep us alive and moving forward in a damaged world. Meitner’s poem “In the Waiting Room of America” appeared in NER 38.4.

In his highly anticipated second poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Random House), Ocean Vuong reckons with grief, the meaning of family, and “the cost of being the product of an American war in America.” Deeply intimate and tender, Time is a Mother embraces the nuances of healing and illuminates a means of survival: “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” Vuong’s poem “To My Father / To My Unborn Son” appeared in NER 36.1.

Written between 2016 and 2020, Dana Levin’s fifth collection, Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press) carries a reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. Formally varied with prosaic breadth, Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out “to be a messenger—to record whatever wanted to stream through.” Levin’s poetry has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 42.2.

Largely composed in Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” Victoria Chang explores loss and redemption in her newest poetry collection, The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press). Chang contrasts these traditional forms with contemporary language, reconciling the loss of her mother, the ache of wanting, and “our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.” Chang’s poetry has appeared in several issues of NER, most recently in issue 41.3.

Rachel Mannheimer explores the intersection of art and love in her book-length narrative poem, Earth Room (Changes). Selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as the winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Earth Room transports the reader across decades and different landscapes, considering art through “observations shaped by gender and environment, history, and portents of apocalypse.” Mannheimer’s poems “Horses” and “Berlin” appeared in NER 42.4.

A young woman in Kamalpur high society must confront the alcoholism of her mother and change her own hard-partying ways in Naheed Phiroze Patel’s Mirror Made of Rain (Unnamed). Patel’s story explores class and traditions in contemporary India in this exhilarating commentary on family, gender, and addiction. Mirror Made of Rain challenges its reader to contend with how society alters the way we view ourselves. Patel’s short story “Call of the Greater Coucal” appeared in NER 39.3.

Britain’s leading military historian, Richard Overy, reassesses World War II in Blood and Ruins (Viking). Overy argues for a more global perspective on WWII that broadens its focus to consider a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, the bitter cost for soldiers, and the heightened level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its aftermath. Overy’s investigation “The Summer Ends, The War Begins” appeared in NER 31.2.

Joseph Pearson’s My Grandfather’s Knife (HarperCollins Canada) catalogues forgotten stories from World War II through the lens of personal artifacts. These everyday objects—a knife, a diary, a recipe book, a stringed instrument, and a cotton pouch—reveal the histories of their young owners, and illuminate the often dark history of the 20th century. Pearson’s nonfiction piece “This is Also Tangier” appeared in NER 39.1.


Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Dana Levin, Erika Meitner, Joseph Pearson, Naheed Phiroze Patel, Ocean Vuong, Rachel Mannheimer, Richard Overy, Victoria Chang

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Brita Fisher

April 11, 2022

Brita Fisher ’15 talks with NER intern Hannah Frankel ’22 about social justice organizing, teaching, and following your interests.


Hannah Frankel: What did you study at Middlebury and where do you live now?

Brita Fisher: I majored in Literary Studies and minored in French. I’m currently living in Calais, Vermont.

HF: Tell us a bit about what you did after you graduated and how you decided what to do.

BF: Right after college I taught English in France for a year, and then taught high school French and a literature elective in English at a private school in southern Vermont for two years. Throughout my time teaching, the curricula I was writing focused on both literature and issues of social justice. For example, we studied immigration, racism in France and the US, decolonization movements and how they intersected with the Civil Rights movement in the US, as well as mass incarceration and the Movement for Black Lives.

During that time I got involved with community organizing through the Root Social Justice Center in Brattleboro, the Vermont Workers’ Center, and Resource Generation. The Root focuses on local racial justice organizing, the Vermont Workers’ Center is an economic justice organization with a campaign for health care as a human right, and Resource Generation organizes young people with access to wealth and/or class privilege for the equitable redistribution of resources to social movements.

After two years teaching in southern Vermont, I thought that I wanted to do something more aligned with organizing for work, so I got a job through AmeriCorps at Vermont Legal Aid in Burlington doing community legal education and community outreach. In the end, I found that working at a nonprofit felt very different than the organizing I felt more passionate about. When my contract ended after a year, I got a job baking to prioritize mental and emotional space for the unpaid community organizing work I had continued to do. I baked for a year and a half before getting a job delivering packages for FedEx. This fall I started a two-year program through Goddard College where I’ll get an MA in teaching and a license to teach English in high school. The program is self-designed so I’ve gotten to center an intersectional social justice lens.

Brita during her time as a literature student at Middlebury College.

HF: How has your professional life changed between then and now?

BF: My professional life has gone through a lot of changes since I graduated. I suppose where I am now—in school for teaching, working part time in food service, and deeply involved in the Vermont Workers’ Center and Resource Generation’s Vermont chapter—represents a blend of where I’ve been since graduating. The biggest changes have been orienting my life around community organizing and then making the decision to go back to teaching in a school. I really value what I’ve learned and accomplished in different organizing contexts, especially in developing and facilitating political education workshops as part of campaigns, and I am excited to add teaching back into my life.

HF: What’s one thing you remember about your time as an intern with NER?

BF: I remember the feeling of being in the cozy and welcoming office and the awe I felt at getting to be involved, in any small way, in the work NER was doing. For Literary Studies we were reading almost exclusively books published before the 1930s, so participating in the active publishing of new material, and seeing how that happens, felt exciting and inspiring to me. The generous way that Marcy and Carolyn brought me into the different processes feels central to my time at NER.

HF: What would you say you learned as an undergrad that really benefits you today, either personally or professionally?

BF: I would say what I learned about my own analysis and writing process—how I like to approach it and what works for me.

HF: What advice do you have for current students that have similar interests and goals as you had when you were a student?

BF: The most concrete advice that comes to mind is to not wait until senior spring to take an intro level class you’ve been wanting to take. I write poetry for myself and waited until senior spring to try to take an intro level creative writing class. I wasn’t able to get into it because I was a senior and wasn’t able to take any of the upper level classes because I had no prerequisites. I’d known for a while that it was something I wanted to do, so I wish I had prioritized taking that class earlier.

HF: What are your favorite ‘guilty pleasure’ reads and what have you read lately that you enjoyed?

BF: I came across the books Daughter of the Forest and Son of the Shadows by Juliet Marillier when I was in eighth or ninth grade. Something about the way she writes about trauma, healing, and the power of myth and storytelling in a fantasy context really moved me then, and I read them multiple times. I periodically return to them when in need of a comfort read. As for what I’ve enjoyed recently, last week I read Passing by Nella Larsen, which is a short and intensely powerful novel about race, racism, and power.

HF: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer all my questions! I hope school goes well and wish you happiness and fulfillment in the future.

Filed Under: Featured, Interns, News & Notes, Where Are They Now Tagged With: Brita Fisher, Hannah Frankel

Meet the Readers

Eric James Cruz

April 4, 2022

“What obsessions are my fellow writers pursuing?  How are others using language as a means to discover and question the world around them?”


Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER? 

My calling is to help young people act upon their humanity by cultivating their intellectual and emotional lives. As a high school English teacher and director of the creative writing and literary magazine program at Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio, Texas, I daily get to see my students grow in their awareness of themselves and the larger world they are coming into. My life is pretty rich: teacher, poet, husband, father. These roles intersect into what I know is a rare life, one in which my labor, passion, and love all inform one another.   

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?

On the advice of my mentor and friend Matthew Olzmann, I got in contact with Jennifer Chang to see if I was a good fit to read for NER. I felt my love for reading poetry coupled with my desire to amplify great work by new and established writers might fit into the ethos of NER. I also wanted to be a reader for NER in order to grow my understanding of the larger conversation happening in poetry at this moment in time. What obsessions are my fellow writers pursuing? How are others using language as a means to discover and question the world around them? These questions interest me greatly, and now, nearly a year into my tenure, I can honestly say that my perspective and appreciation of the work my fellow poets are putting into the world has deepened me in ways large and small.  

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 

I have not yet read a submission that later got selected for publication, but I can say that many of the works I’ve read during my time at NER have left me filled with wonder and that stillness that only good poetry can elicit. I’ve had many wonderful conversations with Jennifer about great pieces throughout my time at NER. 

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission? 

My process is very measured because I feel this immense responsibility to read work carefully and deeply. It is insane to me that I get to have a hand in deciding what is and what is not published, so I usually read a submission two to three times to make sure I’ve honored the time and effort put in by an artist. Poems that resonate with me ultimately uncover further complication, nuance, or complexity.  I love poems that investigate the relationship between the exterior and interior worlds we inhabit. Poems that utilize the music of language, the breath of the line, and the rootedness of concrete language as a way to invite the reader into active participation with the work also capture my attention.  

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally? 

The poem “Like a Wide River” by Paul Otremba is one of my favorite poems from NER in the last four years. There is such a beautiful dance between lineation, line spacing, image, and music in the piece; it is a wonderful fusion of content and form.  

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 

A trusted poetry teacher of mine once told me that if I ever hoped to be a great poet that I must “daily participate in the life of poetry.” As I’ve thought about this advice over the years, I’ve come to realize that being a great poet is not about the number of publications, awards, or how well known one is a poetry personality; it is about how much one reads, takes opportunities to grow in one’s craft, writes when inspired and when it is just too hard, and, above all else, celebrates the larger community of fellows artists who are on a similar journey to you. Reading for NER allows me the opportunity to practice being a good literary citizen. It also inspires and encourages me to lend my voice to the larger chorus and, however big or small my part may be, appreciate the chance I have to sing within it.  

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend? 

I love to read poetry, science fiction, political theory, and, as nerdy as it may sound, craft essays!  Currently, I can’t put down Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard or Jim Harrison’s The Essential Poems. In both books, I get to engage with the minds and hearts of two artists that are entirely original, fierce, and willing to use the platform of language to interrogate, dismantle, and help reshape the world around them.   


Our staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes, Staff Reader Profile Tagged With: Eric James Cruz

Introducing NER 43.1

Spring 2022

March 29, 2022

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!

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes

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Vol. 43, No. 2

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NER Digital

Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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