New England Review

New Books from NER Authors

Spring 2020

“Hypnotically written and impressively weird, My Morningless Mornings is an intense and harrowing meditation on Stefany Anne Golberg’s youthful insomnia. More than that, though, it’s a moving mini-portrait of the bond between a father and his daughter. I really loved this book.”― Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories

From the publisher: In a ranch house in a Vegas suburb, Golberg’s peculiar brand of insomnia lives alongside an ailing father, a professor on permanent leave from the local university. Her mother has moved out, her older brother has gone to college, and she is alone with the night, resisting the fundamental unit by which we measure our lives: the next day itself.

Startling, poignant, and harrowing, Golberg’s voice is informed by an eclectic range of interests, from Bruegel to Jung, Loren Eiseley to Marina Tsvetaeva.  Equal parts coming-of-age memoir, art history, and philosophical inquiry, My Morningless Mornings is a young person’s reckoning with consciousness.

Stefany Anne Golberg  is a writer and multi-media artist who co-founded Flux Factory, an arts collective in Brooklyn. Co-authored with Morgan Meis, she published Dead People (Zero Books, 2016), a series of eulogies about cultural icons, garnering praise from Adam Gopnik, Tom Bissell, and Keith Gessen, among others. She has written for The Washington Post, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the New England Review, and was Critic in Residence at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She now lives in Detroit where she is creating a museum in her house called The Huckleberry Explorers Club. Golberg has a degree in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and an MFA in music/sound art from Bard College. Her essay “Marat Sade in Las Vegas” was published in NER Digital, and “The Hour of the Wolf” first appeared in NER 38.3. 

My Morningless Mornings can be purchased from Unnamed Press or, if your local store is closed for the time being, through Vermont Book Shop and others at Bookshop.org.

“This book is a must read if you were ever a teenage girl, played a team sport, contemplated witchcraft, and/or were alive in the 80s. If like me, all of these things apply, watch out: this book is going to get you.” —Emily Temple, Lit Hub Senior Editor

From the publisher: Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts, where the accusations began that led to the 1692 witch trials, We Ride Upon Sticks follows the 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team, who will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. In chapters dense with 1980s iconography—from Heathers to “big hair”—Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.

Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship.

Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and the New Yorker. Barry’s poem, “Lion,” appeared in NER 27.2.

We Ride Upon Sticks can be purchased from Penguin Random House or, if your local store is closed for the time being, through Vermont Book Shop and others at Bookshop.org.

“A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named ‘among the modern masters'”—Washington Post

From the publisher: Ledger’s pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (“Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw”), Hirshfield’s poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. Hirshfield’s signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world’s current and future fate.

 Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Hirshfield’s work has appeared in several issues of New England Review including NER 21.2 and NER 25.4.

Ledger can be purchased from Penguin Random House or through your local bookstore at Bookshop.org.

New Books from NER Authors

March 2020

“Phillips has the ability to be both enigmatic and reassuring in his work, always going past where you think the poem aims to go, and achieving something greater . . .” —Aaron Robertson of LitHub

From the publisher: A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance.

The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. . . . This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

Carl Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His recent books include Wild Is the Wind and the prose collection The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. His work has been published in multiple issues of NER, most recently in NER 39.1.

Pale Colors in a Tall Field can be bought through Macmillan or at your local bookstore.

“It has been 17 years since Carolyn Forché published a book of poems, and In the Lateness of the World announces she is back . . . Drawing on her own travels and periods of reporting, on the world’s seemingly endless upheaval, these poems move beyond disquiet and creates the charged ethical field in which we all live, all the time, especially at that moment we move.” —John Freeman of LitHub

From the publisher: A new poetry collection of uncanny grace and moral force from one of our country’s most celebrated poets. Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. 

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World, is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché envisions a place where “you could see everything at once . . . every moment you have lived or place you have been.” The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Her work can be found in NER 16.2.

In the Lateness of the World can be purchased from Penguin Random House or from your local bookstore.

“Here there are elegies for the self, litanies for the dead, a childlessness both mourned and celebrated, a life ripe with every hurt and desire.” —Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins

From the publisher: Fruit grapples with what it means to be childless in a world defined by procreation. Poems move between the scientific and the biblical, effortlessly sliding from the clinical landscape of a sperm bank to Mount Moriah as Abraham prepares Isaac for sacrifice. Exploring issues of sexuality, lineage, and mortality, Snider delves into subjects as varied as the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky; same-sex couple adoption; and Gregor Mendel’s death. Each poem builds into a broader examination of power and fragility, domesticity and rebellion, violence and devotion: heartrending vignettes of the aches and joys of growing up and testing the limits of nature and nurture. In language both probing and sensitive, Fruit delivers its own conflicted and celebratory answers to pressing questions of life, death, love, and biology.

Bruce Snider is the author of Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Gettysburg Review. He was a Wallace Stegner fellow, a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and a Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco. His writing has appeared in NER 37.2 and 38.3.

Fruit can be purchased from the University of Wisconsin Press or at your local bookstore.

Elizabeth Kadetsky's The Memory Eaters

A New Book from NER’s Nonfiction Editor

We are beyond excited to announce the release of a new memoir by our very own nonfiction editor, Elizabeth Kadetsky, by the University of Massachusetts Press. Pick up your copy on its official release day, March 31!

From the publisher: While trying to juggle her own life and work in the first decade of the millennium, Kadetsky was also struggling to care for her mother- a former Pucci and runway model in the deep throes of late-stage Alzheimer’s- fight with Medicare, and deal with her sister Jill- who was bouncing in and out of New York rehab and homeless centers. At the same time, Kadetsky was reconnecting with her French-Canadian family, trying to “inhabit my mother’s past in order to resolve” these decades of trauma and family secrets.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, Post Road, Agni, and elsewhere. She has written for The Village Voice, The Nation, and more. She has travelled to Malta as a creative writing fellow at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, to France as a fellow in the arts at Camargo Foundation, and to India as a two-time Fulbright fellow. She is the author of the memoir First There is a Mountain (Dzanc Books rEprint series, 2019; and Little Brown, 2004), the novella On the Island at the Center of the World (Nouvella, 2015), and the short story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014). She is an associate professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State University. She has been a nonfiction editor at New England Review for two years. 

The Memory Eaters can be purchased from University of Massachusetts Press or at your local bookstore. 

New Books by NER Authors

February 2020

Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties and In The Dream House.

From the publisher: While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.

And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life . . . The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe. Shapland is a former New England Review intern and graduate of Middlebury College.

My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers can be purchased from Tin House or your local independent bookstore.

[Bibbins’s] Ginsu wit and knack for outing the demons under our skin . . . becomes the perfect tableturning weapon against the culture of mass distraction. ―Boston Review

From the publisher: Mark Bibbins’s book-length poem sequence brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into new light—an account that approximates, with stunning lyricism, “what music sounds like / just before the record skips.” Addressed to a dead beloved, 13th Balloon troubles the cloud-like space of grief by piecing together the fragmented experiences of youth and loss, anguish and desire. Part elegy, part memoir in verse, this is a groundbreaking collection whose trajectory runs counter to the impulse toward nostalgia, unearthing what was thought to have burned in the fire.

Mark Bibbins is the author of three books with Copper Canyon including 13th Balloon; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, named one of the best poetry collections of 2014 by Publishers Weekly; and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, The New School, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003), and was a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. His work has appeared in NER 29.4 and  34.2.

13th Balloon can be purchased from Copper Canyon Press or at your local bookstore.

This fifth and most daring book yet sings deeply, solemn and vulnerable, a blues for our times. —Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest

From the publisher: In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.

Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism.

Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He has edited Best American Poetry 2019 and is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson lives Vermont where he is a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. Jackson read at NER‘s Vermont Reading Series in 2013.

The Absurd Man can be purchased from W. W. Norton or at your local bookstore.

Every poem seems made to steady and fortify him against mortality. —Dan Chiasson of the New Yorker

From the publisher: Survival is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought . . . one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

Christian Wiman is the author of two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (FSG, 2018); Every Riven Thing (FSG, 2010), winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry; Once in the West (FSG, 2014), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in poetry; and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in NER 21.1, 24.1, and 30.2.

Survival is a Style can be purchased from Macmillan or at your local bookstore.

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