New England Review

November 2021

New Books from NER Authors

Another month, another busy release schedule for our authors—and just in time for holiday wish lists! Here are eight new books from an accomplished assortment of New England Review poets, essayists, and short story writers.

The New Rivers Press publishes NER author Rosaleen Bertolino’s debut book, The Paper Demon and Other Stories. A collection of twelve stories, The Paper Demon counts among its subjects “runaways, witches, violent children, and shape-changing cats” as the book explores the interior insights, and mysteries, of love, death, family dynamics, and “meanness conscientiously displayed.” The manuscript won the 2019 Many Voices Project Prose competition. Bertolino’s fiction appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 38.3, and has been read at our NER Out Loud event. 

Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press) is the eleventh poetry collection from NER author and poet Marianne Boruch. Written following Boruch’s Fulbright sejour in Australia, the collection thematically engages the poetic ecology of human and environment to explore Pliny the Elder’s perennial question: Is the world finite? Boruch’s poems and short essays have made multiple appearances in the pages of NER, most recently in NER 42.1 and NER 39.1. 

Inventory of Doubts (Tupelo Press) is the latest collection from NER poet and artist Landon Godfrey. The winning manuscript of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, Inventory of Doubts juxtaposes anthropomorphic subjects in all arrangements with the book’s alphabetized structure. The influences of surrealism are not lost in this book, described as “thrilling” and full of “whimsy,” as Godfrey explores animal and object sentience. Godfrey’s poetry appeared in NER 38.3. 

NER founding editor, author, and poet Sydney Lea releases Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life with Green Writers Press. In this compendium of newspaper columns authored by Lea during his 2011-2015 tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate, Lea explores “how the making of a poet’s art resembles the making of any reader’s life.” Lea’s appearances in NER are numerous; his poetry was most recently included in NER 41.3. 

Author, Best American Poetry editor, and  NER poet David Lehman adds another poetry collection to his list of publications with this fall’s release of The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh Press). Meditating “on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age,” The Morning Line engages subjects with intelligence, intimacy, and inclusivity. Lehman’s poem “The Red Death” appeared in NER 27.4.

From Askold Melnyczuk comes The Man Who Would Not Bow and Other Stories (Grand Iota), a collection of eight stories spanning the New World and the Old. Melnyczuk’s fifth book, The Man Who Would Not Bow builds upon a subtly linked cast of characters, all grappling with their “angels and demons.” The title story appeared in NER 42.1.

NER author Julia Ridley Smith’s memoir, The Sum of Trifles, is out from the University of Georgia Press this November. Composed through a series of essays, the memoir pulls apart the layers of meaning to the objects her parents left behind. A remembrance and a dive into the material symbols of identity and purpose, The Sum of Trifles explores grief and things in both past and present. Smith’s essay “A Miniature for My Mother” appeared in NER 38.4.

Translator, author, and NER poet Carolyne Wright releases her sixth poetry collection, Masquerade, with Lost Horse Press. Rooted in places—Seattle and pre-Katrina New Orleans—and identities, Masquerade is “a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems” that reflects on finding place in aspiration, passion, and ideals despite the ever-present backdrop of American racism. Wright’s poem “A Reply to Storms in New Orleans” appeared in NER 21.4.

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

Fall 2021: October Poetry Feature

New Books from NER Authors

The leaves outside are turning and gravity is covering our sidewalks in chestnuts and apples (Sir Isaac Newton would be smiling). With cooler weather on its way, we recommend grabbing a cup of tea and enjoying a title or two from these New England Review authors and translators.

Poet Jeffrey Franklin releases his second collection, Where We Lay Down (Kelsay Books). A “multifarious and expansive collection,” the book is split thematically into six explorations: Fathers and Sons, Making Love, Making War, Homing, Totem Animals, and Full Emptiness. Influenced by Franklin’s own interests in religion and spirituality, Where We Lay Down delves into human conditions around maturation and reflection. Franklin’s poem, “To a Student Who Reads ‘The Second Coming’ As Sexual Autobiography,” appeared in NER 22.3.

Machete (Knopf), the third collection from poet Tomás Q Morín, is released this month. Described as a “lyrical, dynamic, insightful collection, at once delicate and fierce, touching on climate, family, racism, growth, and life itself,” Machete explores suffering and its intersections with reactions of both anger and laughter. Morín’s poems have previously appeared in NER 35.3, NER 33.2, and NER 32.2; his piece “A Renaissance Mule” was published as an NER Digital in 2012. 

Jane Wong publishes her sophomore collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Anything (Alice James Books). Composed around central themes of migration and loss, grief and alienation, How to Not Be Afraid of Anything grapples with immigrant identities as made relational to histories past and present. Wong’s poem “I Haul a House Out of the Bay” was published in NER 39.4. 

My Wilderness: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press) is the latest collection from poet Maxine Scates. Traversing the emotional landscapes of motherhood and memory through explorations of loss and empathy, My Wilderness “is a grave and beautiful archive of losses.” The book’s title poem, “My Wilderness,” appeared in NER 37.2. 

Poet and writer Victoria Chang publishes Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief with Milkweed Editions. Despite not being labelled explicitly as a poetry collection, Dear Memory encapsulates the “process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry,” as Chang explores themes of immigrant identity, history, grief, and knowledge of the self through family relics and letters. Chang’s poetry has appeared in numerous issues since 2002, most recently NER 41.3 and NER 38.3. 

Yu Xiuhua’s Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays (Astra House) is released in English through collaboration with poet and NER translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Thematically organized around love and writing, on mortality, the natural world, and nostalgia, the collection’s poems and essays are “in conversation with each other,” as Yu utilizes the written form to grapple with family, home, and “the reality of disability in the context of a body’s urges and desires.” Sze-Lorrain’s translations have appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 36.2.

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

Fall 2021

New Books by NER Authors

Autumn is upon us at the New England Review office, and so is literary release season! Here are six more recent releases from NER authors.

The Mighty Oak (Blackstone Publishing), Jeff W. Bens’s sophomore novel, receives a paperback release this month. An emotional tale, set into action by the death of a mother and a middle-aged hockey-playing antihero’s journey home, The Mighty Oak “tackles male violence, the complexities of parenthood, and the contrary draw to both numbness and connection in wholly alive and thrilling ways.” Bens’s short story, “Golden Day,” appeared in NER 19.1.

Playwright, author, and translator James Magruder’s Vamp Until Ready (Rattling Good Yarns Press) creates a unique portrait of Ithaca in the ’80s through the linked narratives of a small cast of characters, all affiliated by employment at the Hangar Theatre. A “pleasant romp” in ‘townie’ community and character, Vamp Until Ready promises to explore identity and chance. Magruder’s piece, “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème,” was published in NER 32.3.

Susan Daitch, whose essays were published in NER 42.1, releases her new novel Siege of Comedians (Dzanc) this October. Told in triptych, the novel’s three arcs thread, “across time by intersecting crimes and themes of language, cultural assimilation, and nationalist conflicts.” Described as “part political thriller, part comic noir,” Siege of Comedians engages with human trafficking and refugee crises alongside broader issues of identity. 

Poet, frequent NER contributor, and former director of Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Michael Collier publishes Missing Mountain (University of Chicago Press). Collier’s eighth poetry collection, comprised of new and selected poems, both chronicles and celebrates “the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of his passions and concerns.” Collier’s poetry has appeared most recently in NER 32.3, and his “Tribute to Steve Orlen,” appeared in NER 31.4.

Author and Middlebury alumnus Peter Knobler collaborates with Bill Bratton in a new memoir, The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America (Penguin Press). Building around Bratton’s experience as a police chief and commissioner in Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston, The Profession provides insider insight to the examination of policing, past and present. Knobler’s essay “Dancing in the Dark” appeared in NER Digital in 2018.

Alex McElroy’s debut novel, The Atmospherians (Simon & Schuster), follows two friends, Sasha and Dyson, as they embark on an entrepreneurial journey to solve toxic masculinity. Heralded by early critics as “darkly funny and glitteringly satirical,” the novel explores contemporary issues at the intersections of wellness, wokeness, social media culture, and gender politics. McElroy was a 2017 finalist for the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. Their piece, “Endure,” was included in NER 37.4.

Cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases can be found at our Bookshop.org page.

September 2021

New Books by NER Authors

As we transition into the fall season, check out these new and forthcoming titles from our authors!

Devon Walker-Figueroa was the winner of NER’s fourth annual Emerging Writer Award. Her debut collection of poems, Philomath (Milkweed Editions), is the winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and “a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.” With an explorer’s eye, “Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is ‘merely existence carrying on and carrying on.’ In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn’t flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.” The title poem of her collection, “Philomath,” was originally published in NER 38.1

Christopher Sorrentino, author of the novels Trance, The Fugitives, and Sound on Sound, and whose work appeared in NER 26.2, recently released his debut memoir, Now Beacon, Now Sea (Catapult). A intimate meditation on familial grief, the book is “a defining account of what it means to love and lose a difficult parent” and “a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.”

Poet and translator Jennifer Grotz worked with Piotr Sommer to co-translate the selected works of Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski in Everything I Don’t Know (World Poetry Books). Lauded by author Matthew Zapruder as “one of Poland’s best kept secrets,” Jerzy Ficowski’s poems are “a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and ‘shudders / with a tsunami.'” Grotz’s poems and translations have been featured frequently in NER. Two poems from Everything I Don’t Know, “Revolt” and “My Attempted Travels,” have been published in NER 38.2. Read our most recent conversation with Jennifer Grotz and Simone Kraus on the world of translation.

Gabeba Baderoon‘s The History of Intimacy (Triquarterly Books) is “a tender, tangled account of the heady days in South Africa following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. This award-winning poetry collection portrays the innovative forms of music, kinship, and even self in ‘the new, intricate country / we understood was impossible.'” Baderoon’s piece, “Finding and Growing Athlone” was featured in NER 38.4‘s selection of writing from contemporary South African authors.

In Becky Hagenston‘s fourth collection, The Age of Discovery (Mad Creek Books), “the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be.” Hagenston’s short story “Rise” was featured in NER 37.2.

Poet Maggie Smith writes towards the beauty of the present moment in Goldenrod (Atria/One Signal Publishers). “Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment.” The poems in her latest collection “celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.” Smith’s poem, “The Hum” was featured in NER 40.1.

You can find these and other NER authors’ books at our page at Bookshop.org.

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