New England Review

Summer 2021

New Books by NER Authors

Three new titles from our NER authors mark the start of a prolific summer publication season!

Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women, recently returned with another explosive look into the interior lives of women. Animal (Avid Reader Press) is “a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society.” Her short story “Forty-Two” was published in NER 36.1, performed in NER Out Loud, and selected for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.

Novelist and poet Maria Hummel released her latest novel, Lesson In Red (Counterpoint Press), a provocative, noir thriller that “exposes dark questions about power and the art world and reveals the fatal mistakes that can befall those who threaten its status quo.” Maria Hummel contributions to NER include her poem “The First Turn Might Be the Right One Home” in NER 34.1, her story “No Others Before Me” in NER 31.2, and her poem “Keepers” in NER 27.3.

Rachel Hadas is a poet, translator, essayist, and author of more than twenty books throughout the span of her career. Her most recent release, Piece by Piece (Paul Dry Books), is a collection of selected prose that “sifts through the texts and experiences of her bookish life to pass on her findings to new readers.” Her work has appeared numerous times in NER, and her poem “Mysterious Microclimates” appears in the summer 2021 issue, NER 42.2.

You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Summer 2021 Bookshop page.

April and May 2021

New Books by NER Authors

It’s been a great publication season for NER authors! In his latest collection of poetry, We the Jury (Milkweed Editions), Wayne Miller grapples with difficult questions and “faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior?” Miller’s poem, “On Progress” was featured in NER 37.2 and new work is forthcoming in our summer 2021 issue (NER 42.2).

Carey Salerno‘s Tributary (Persea Books) is another collection of poems grounded in search and discovery. “Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty.” Salerno’s poem, “Baptism with a Pond in It” was featured in NER 40.1.

Mark Neely, published in NER 37.2, released his third book, Ticker (Lost Horse Press). The title won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and has been praised by its final judge as “[containing] almost everything—religion, calamity, politics, race, love, children, the Challenger disaster, Taco Bell, Oliver North, CVS, a main character named Bruce. In these poems, which are all the time moving between the cynical and ecstatic, Neely never once turns his half-stare half-glare away from this strange, brutal country of ours.”

Celeste Mohammed, lawyer, emerging writer, and mother of a two-year-old, “reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream” in her novel, Pleasantview (Ig Publishing). Mohammed has won multiple writing awards, including the 2018 Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her debut story published in NER, the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. Her story appeared in NER 38.1.

Barrett Swanson published a “collection of critically acclaimed essays and reportage,” Lost in Summerland this May. The opening essay of the book was featured in NER 38.2. Elissa Gabbert, published in NER 41.3 and author of The Unreality of Memory, writes, “In essays that are moving and candid, personal and sweeping, Lost in Summerland seeks alternatives to national myths and tries to name the ‘unnamable turbulence’ we’re living through, to rescue the ineffable from invisibility.”

Naheed Patel is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, which published an article announcing her debut novel, A Mirror Made of Rain (Fourth Estate India). According to Patel, “I began writing A Mirror Made of Rain as a way to come to terms with the untimely death of my father. I hoped, by writing a character based on him, to keep him a part of my life for a bit longer…” Patel’s short story appeared in NER 39.3.

Noah Warren just published his second collection, The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon Press), where he, “…unravels histories both personal and public, picking apart their ugliness, beauty, and irreducible singularity.” His first collection, The Destroyer in the Glass was chosen by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Warren was published in NER 40.1.

You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.

April 2021

New Books by NER Authors

It’s been a busy publication month for NER authors! Emily Pittinos, published in NER 40.1, released her debut book of poems, The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press), a compilation of tender reflections both elegiac and ecological rooted in the domestic and natural worlds.

Essayist, poet, and pie lady Kate Lebo recently published The Book of Difficult Fruit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of twenty-six lyrical essays (with recipes) centered on fruit, giving “insights into relationships, self-care, land stewardship, medical and botanical history, and so much more.” Her essays have appeared in NER 35.2 and 36.4.

Jehanne Dubrow’s Wild Kingdom (LSU Press) is a book of poetry that explores the landscape of academia and holds a mirror to its inhabitants, asking within its pages “how scholars and educators can work to ensure that institutions of higher learning continue to nurture students and remain places of rigorous critical thinking.” Dubrow has been published frequently in NER, most recently with the poem “What Do You Give the War That Has Everything” in NER 41.2.

In his seventh volume of poetry, Selected Poems 1983-2020 (House of Anansi Press), Steven Heighton brings together previously unpublished works as well as key poems from past acclaimed collections to create a volume that showcases what critics have called “a defining lyric poet of his generation.” Heighton’s past work has been featured in NER 35.1 and 38.3.

Dan O’Brien, acclaimed poet, playwright, and former Guggenheim Fellow in Drama, published A Story That Happens (CB Editions), a series of four essays that “offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, ‘afraid and hopeful’, we begin to tell them.” O’Brien’s performance piece, “The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage” was featured in NER 38.3 and his memoir, “Dear Brother,” appeared in NER 40.2.

Finally, Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner and NER’s new staff reader in poetry, Tiana Nobile, released her debut poetry collection Cleave (Hub City Press). In its conversations, the book “grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience” while exploring the nature of familial relationships and love.

You can shop these April titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.

Four Recent Poetry Collections

New Books by NER Authors

Spring continues to be a busy season for NER authors — particularly our poets! Kerrin McCadden released American Wake (Black Sparrow Press), a book of poetry that explores the author’s Irish identity as well as “family, death and grief, apologies, and all manner of departures.” McCadden’s poem, “The Magpie: A Key” was published in NER 40.3.

Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for her book Four-Legged Girl, recently published frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press). This candid collection of sonnets chronicles “a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again.” Seuss’s poem “Memento Mori” was featured in NER 36.4.

Fady Joudah’s latest release, Tethered to Stars: Poems (Milkweed Editions), “inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire.” Joudah’s poetry has appeared in NER 38.4.

Cortney Lamar Charleston, published in NER 37.2, released his much anticipated second volume of poetry, Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books). The collection “examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.”

You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.

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