JUNE 20: David Huddle and Gregory Spatz, 7 pm at the Vermont Book Shop.

New England Review

June 2019

New Books by NER Authors

“Don’t miss Hazel Hicks. She may try you, she may frustrate you, she may exasperate you. But you will not forget her.” — Castle Freeman, Jr.

From the publisher: Hazel is a portrait of an ordinary and exceptional person, revealed in a sequence of narratives that present chapters of her life from childhood into her senior years.

David Huddle is the author of more than twenty previous books, including fiction, essays, and poetry. His novel Nothing Can Make Me Do This (Tupelo, 2011) won the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction, and his Black Snake at the Family Reunion won the PEN New England Award for Poetry. He teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and the Rainier Writing Workshop. A native of Ivanhoe, Virginia, Huddle has lived in Vermont for over four decades, and served as Acting Editor of the New England Review from 1993 to 1995 and as Contributing Editor in 1988. Read his stories “Poison Oak,” published in NER 1.3, and “Scotland,” from NER 13.2.

Hazel can be ordered from the publisher here, or purchased at your local independent book store.

“This collection is magical, hypnotic, brilliant.” — Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers.

From the publisher: Going where most readers have never been — past the workshop door, behind the curtain to the hidden rehearsal space, and into the back room of a pawn shop or dealer’s office, Gregory Spatz’s new book delves deeply into the world of those who build, play, and sell (or steal) violins. This is a realm of obsession, of high-stakes sales and thefts, and of rapturous but also desperate performance escapades. Dense with detail, and peopled with a fabulously particular (yes, eccentric) ensemble cast, the linked pieces in What Could Be Saved—two of novella length, and two stories—have the intense force and beauty of chamber music.

Gregory Spatz is the author of the novels Inukshuk, Fiddler’s Dream, and No One But Us, and of the story collections Half as Happy and Wonderful Tricks. The recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Washington State Book Award, and an NEA Fellowship in literature, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Spatz plays the fiddle in the twice Juno-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds. His stories have appeared such publications as The New Yorker, Glimmer Train Stories, Shenandoah, Epoch, Kenyon Review and New England Review, where his work has been featured in over seven issues: first in 1992 (NER 14.2), and most recently in 2017 (NER 38.4).

What Could be Saved can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal… Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” — Ron Charles, The Washington Post


From the publisher: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. 

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Read his poem “To My Father/To My Unborn Son” published in NER 36.1.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

“Aronson’s examination of medical culture in stories, of the brutality and tenderness at home and hospital, is a gem. [Her] voice is tender and one from which I hope we’ll hear more histories in the future.” — Washington Independent Review of Books 


From the publisher: Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that’s neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy — a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author’s own words, “an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being.”

Louise Aronson has an MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and an MD from Harvard Medical School. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California where she cares for diverse, frail older patients and directs the Pathways to Discovery Program, the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center and UCSF Medical Humanities. She lives in San Francisco. Read her piece “Necessary Violence” published in NER 38.3.

Elderhood can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

An extraordinary novel by war correspondent Grossman, completing, with Life and Fate, a two-volume Soviet-era rejoinder to War and Peace… A classic of wartime literature finally available in a comprehensive English translation that will introduce new readers to a remarkable writer.
— Kirkus, starred review

From the publishers: The story told in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters include mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political activists, steelworkers, and peasants, along with Hitler and other historical figures. In Stalingrad, published here for the first time in English translation, and in its celebrated sequel, Life and Fate, Grossman writes with extraordinary power and deep compassion about the disasters of war and the ruthlessness of totalitarianism, without, however, losing sight of the little things that are the daily currency of human existence or of humanity’s inextinguishable, saving attachment to nature and life.

The Robert and Elizabeth Chandlers’ other translations include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (Vintage Classics, 2012) and works by Vasily Grossman (NYRB Classics). Robert Chandler has edited and served as primary translator for Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, and co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. The Chandlers’ translation of Teffi’s “Lifeless Beast” appeared in NER 34.3-4.

Stalingrad can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

“A brilliant, sorrowful, hopeful, hilarious, painfully honest love letter, not just to Stoner but to writing, marriage, teaching, reading, parenting, even death. Which makes this book, like the one it praises, a love letter to life.” — Matthew Zapruder, author of Come On All You Ghosts and Why Poetry


From the publisher: Stoner tells the story of William Stoner. Born into a poor Missouri farming family at the end of the nineteenth century, Stoner is sent to the state university to study agronomy. Instead, he falls in love with literature and becomes a professor. In this achingly beautiful novel, we witness the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner’s life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, and the failure of his academic career to prosper, all set against the dramatic changes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Against Football and Candyfreak. His short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the Best American Mysteries, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He hosts the New York Times “Dear Sugars” podcast with Cheryl Strayed. His story “The Course of True Love” appeared in NER 38.2 and a new story will be published in 40.2 (summer 2019).

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life can be purchased from the publisher here or at your local independent bookstore.

May 2019

New Books by NER Authors

“Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the publisher: Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

Paisley Rekdal is Utah’s Poet Laureate and the author of a book of essays, a hybrid photo-text memoir, and five books of poetry. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, and the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, and the Best American Poetry series. A regular NER contributor since 2005, Rekdal’s most recent NER publication, “The Erotic Wounds of War,” was featured in 39.4.

“Sze artfully matches style and content… Finely crafted and philosophical, this is a book that rewards multiple careful readings.” ―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.

Arthur Sze is the author of Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009), Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005), and The Redshifting Web (Copper Canyon, 1998). He is the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His poem “Entanglement” was featured in NER 40.1.

From the publisher: For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani (trans. Alexander Booth) captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War—and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani’s novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of a first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy’s struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless a tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations were featured in NER 37.3.

You can purchase Love Write Large here from the publisher or from your local independent bookseller.

“In the tradition of Katherine Anne Porter, Parker’s exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Set in the hardscrabble landscape of early 1900s Oklahoma, but timeless in its sensibility, Prairie Fever traces the intense dynamic between the Stewart sisters: the pragmatic Lorena and the chimerical Elise. The two are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. That connection supersedes all else until the arrival of Gus McQueen. With honesty and poetic intensity and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, Michael Parker reminds us of the consequences of our choices. Expansive and intimate, this novel tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. In addition to New England Review, his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, and other publications. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. Read his O. Henry Prize winning story “Stop ‘n’ Go,” featured in NER 38.1.

Prairie Fever can be purchased online from the publisher here, or from your local independent bookseller.

More NER Author Books for April

“[Beattie’s] elegantly sculpted tale is both wrenchingly sad and ultimately enigmatic: as usual.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the publisher: A razor-sharp, deeply felt new novel–the twenty-first book by Ann Beattie–about the complicated relationship between a charismatic teacher and his students, and the secrets we keep from those we love. Written by one of our most iconic writers, known for casting a cold eye on her generation’s ambivalence and sometimes mistaken ambition, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is a keenly observed psychological study of a man who alternates between careful driving and hazardous risk taking, as he struggles to incorporate his past into the vertiginous present.

Ann Beattie has published twenty-one books and lives with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, in Maine. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read her story, “Octascope,” which appeared in NER 1.1.

A Wonderful Stroke of Luck can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament. [. . .] Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” —Oliver de la Paz

From the publisher: Winner of the James Laughlin Award, Geffrey Davis’s award-winning second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the 1980s crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA, 2019), and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and New England Review in NER 39.2. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Night Angler can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Keetje Kuipers’s poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.” —Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Wade in the Water

From the publisher: A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’s decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family—it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010); The Keys to the Jail (2014); and All Its Charms (2019). Kuipers’s poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Best American Poetry, Narrative, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and New England Review in NER 39.2. Kuipers lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea, where she is a faculty member at Seattle’s Hugo House and Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

All Its Charms can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Rollins’s debut is a book of dissonance, with race and women’s bodies proving two unyielding concerns throughout this four-part work [. . .] In poem after poem, Rollins demonstrates that she is finding her own way, shining a light, making darkness apparent.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins’ ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. “Memory is about the future, not the past,” she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins’ poetry seeks to challenge the status quo, engaging in a diverse, boundary-defying dialogue with an ever-present reminder of the ways race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture collide.

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as a Librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and New England Review. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. Read her poem “Five and a Possible,” featured in NER 39.3.

Library of Small Catastrophes can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“It is difficult to think of a poet writing today who could surpass Marilyn Hacker’s combined formal, sonic and linguistic dexterity… Hacker’s poems reach with both hands towards an intimacy of place, language, knowledge and more.” —Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring Bulletin 2019

From the publisher: A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation
This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker’s engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman’s call for “an internationality of languages.”

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris, and has been a regular NER contributor since 1980; most recently, her translation of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen’s poetry was featured in NER 39.4 and new poetry is forthcoming this summer in 40.2.

Blazons can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

April Books by NER Authors

“Mr. Holdefer is an abundantly gifted, witty writer. His creation, his delightful doppelganger Blast, is a funny, goofy, erudite, Baron Munchausen of magic.” —Tom Frame in Genii Magazine

From the publisher: Charles Holdefer has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world’s longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full color by Royce M. Becker.

Charles Holdefer, author of four novels, including The Contractor and Back In The Game, grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France. His short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines including New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, The Antioch Review, World Literature Today, and New York Journal of Books. Read his essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism,” published in NER 32.3 and his short story “Big and Nasty,” published in NER 37.1.

Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast is available from the publisher here, or can be found at your local independent bookstore.

“With Lynne Thompson’s new collection FRETWORK, one feels spurred on by the cherished care of the American emigrant story, which is to say, the buttressing and fortifying of the dream with all of its inglorious and joyous plots and twists.” —Major Jackson

Winner of the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

Lynne Thompson is the author of three chapbooks and the poetry collections START WITH A SMALL GUITAR, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and FRETWORK. She received Honorable Mention in Pushcart Prize XLII, an Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, and was a finalist for the 2018 Toi Derricotte/Cornelius Eady Chapbook Award. Thompson serves as Reviews & Essays Editor for the literary journal Spillway. Thompson was born in Los Angeles, California, and received a BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern Law School. Read her poem “Langston won’t stay in his grave,” in NER 39.4.

Fretwork can be purchased here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time.” — Diane Seuss

From the publisher: Paris Review Staff Pick; A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection; Recommended by Buzzfeed News; A Rumpus Book Club Pick; One of Nylon’s Best Books to Read in 2019; One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019.

Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her poem “The Price of Rain,” was featured in NER 37.4, and performed at the annual NER Out Loud event in February 2017. Listen to it here.

Soft Science can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Nouns & Verbs is a lifelong manifesto on joy and vigor, a message in a bottle for all of us who ‘scrabble within the skin of time / like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor.’” —U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

From the publisher: A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 27.3 and 35.1. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.

Nouns & Verbs can be purchased from the publisher here or found at your local independent bookseller.

“‘To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices’ is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance. . . .What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” —Kaveh Akbar, The Paris Review

From the publisher: In Reenactments, Hai-Dang Phan grapples with the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as the son of Vietnamese refugees. Through a kaleidoscope of poetic forms, the past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles providing urgent perspectives on conflicts both private and public.

Hai-Dang Phanwas born in Vietnam in 1980 and grew up in Wisconsin. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2016, and the New England Review in NER 36.4 and 38.2. He is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. He currently teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Reenactments is his first book. Read his poem “My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look Like Tourists” here.

Reenactments can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“…Mills proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet’s ability to manage enormous shifts of scale… Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather’s ‘involvement in the Nagasaki mission,’ Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors’ accounts, and sifts through white sands…Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

From the publisher: Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge—particularly of the atomic bombs the US dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the US conducted throughout the twentieth century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author’s grandfather’s possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.

Tyler Mills is the author of two books of poems, Hawk Parable (winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 36.3. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center, and scholarships/fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee, the Chicago native is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University, editor-in-chief of The Account, and a resident of Santa Fe, NM.

Hawk Parable can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

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