New England Review

New Books from NER Authors

April 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.

New Books from NER Authors & Middlebury College Faculty

March 2022 (Part 2)

March continues to be a busy month for New England Review authors! Here are six more recent releases to ease you into the spring season. Check out part 1 of our March author roundup here.

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s latest collection of fiction, How Strange a Season (Scribner), captures women’s struggles and interactions with the natural world as they navigate inherited challenges. Although each story stands alone, How Strange a Season is strikingly cohesive and layered in its exploration of intimacy and grief. Mayhew Bergman is a professor in literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College and is the director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Robert Lopez blurs the line between reality and perception in A Better Class of People (DZanc Books), a series of linked stories set in a distorted version of New York City. As we follow a man riding the subway “through the chaos of an ordinary commute,” Lopez shuffles back and forth through time and space to show the man in other disturbing situations, illuminating topics like immigration, police brutality, and sexual harassment. Lopez’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 41.1.

Set in the backdrop of the Bahamas, Allegra Hyde‘s Eleutheria (Vintage) tackles the challenges of climate change through a thrilling utopian lens. In this debut novel, a troubled Willa Marks moves to Eleutheria to work at Camp Hope among a group of eco-warriors and their leader, Roy Adams. When she arrives in the Bahamas, she’s met with the startling realization that Adams is missing and Camp Hope’s mission is at risk. Willa yearns for hope and urgent action in this illuminating and timely tale. Hyde’s short story “Shark Fishing” appeared in NER 35.4.

Through a series of riveting mysteries, Dennis McFadden’s Old Grimes Is Dead (Summerhill Publishing) shares the fascinating resurrection of a Black man by a group of white doctors in western Pennsylvania in 1857. Although famous (or infamous) at the time, this antebellum tale is based in part on historical fact, bringing to life forgotten pieces of American lore and real characters from the past. This novel includes “Little Brier,” an excerpt originally published in NER 35.3.

From third person accounts to essays in the form of notes, instructions, and extended meditations, Matthew Vollmer’s collection This World is Not Your Home (EastOver Press) offers creative nonfiction in a variety of forms. One essay offers instructions for how to write a love story while another describes a spectacular cosmic phenomenon experienced by a husband and wife on a walk after dark. Vollmer’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 33.1.

Ethereal, transitory, and bittersweet, Yanyi’s latest poetry collection, Dream of the Divided Field (One World), proposes that our complex identities embody all of these characteristics and more. As the poet grapples with the wounds left by heartbreak and diaspora, he also deliberates on the rose-tinted manner in which we recall the things and people we love, even as memory creates an image that has little resemblance to reality. Three poems from the collection—“Catullus 85,” “Detail,” and “Dreams of the Divided Field”—were published in NER 42.3.

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

New Books from NER Authors & Staff

March 2022 (Part 1)

This roundup includes several poetry collections, a short story debut, and a biography of a groundbreaking neuroscientist. Give these titles a look and stay tuned for part 2!

Daisy Fried’s follow-up to Poems and Advice is The Year the City Emptied (Flood Editions), a collection that translates and reimagines French author Charles Baudelaire’s poems. Although Fried interprets Baudelaire “without the grave difficulty of confronting a completely blank page,” her poems are raw and visceral in their treatment of contemporary issues, including the ongoing pandemic, lockdowns, political protest, and the death of a loved one. Fried’s poem “Forcefeeding” appeared in NER 36.1.

In her debut short story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere (Catapult), O. Henry Prize winner Sindya Bhanoo tells the story of three South Indian immigrants. Each of these women embark on parallel journeys where “regret, hope and triumph remain in disguise.” Bhanoo’s stories are consistent in their haunting prose, as well as their meditative, empathic style. In “No. 16 Model House Road,” a woman deliberates on whether she will defy her husband; “A Life in America” focuses on a professor who is accused of exploiting his students; a school shooting destroys a mother’s world in “Nature Exchange.” “No. 16 Model House Road” appeared in NER 41.4.

Poet Tomás Q. Morín’s memoir, Let Me Count the Ways (University of Nebraska), explores and reconciles machismo, poverty, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Morín—who grew up in a small South Texas town in the eighties and nineties—recalls events from his tumultuous early life, including a memory of helping his father spot unmarked cop cars. Let me Count the Ways is a “vivid portrait of South Texas life” that “challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.” Morín’s poems appear in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 35.3.

In The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—the first major biography of Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal—author Benjamin Ehrlich lauds the incredible achievements and research of his subject while telling a deeply human story set in early 20th century Spain. Beginning with Cajal’s complex relationship with his father—a temperamental physician—Ehrlich steadily makes the case for the importance of Cajal’s work to our modern understanding of neurons. Ehrlich is a senior reader for NER.

Wry, unorthodox, and delightful, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry) by poet Susan Rich demonstrates a literary balancing act between the serious and the whimsical. Subjects in Rich’s fifth collection of poetry include vegetarian vampires, musings on middle age, and fun vignettes that explore the nature of travel. “Let love be imminent and let it be a train; / let it arrive at dawn, its whistle whiskering the air,” Rich writes in “A Middle Life: A Romance.” Rich’s poem “String Theory with Heartache” was published in NER 39.2.

Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route (Alice James) presents poems as letters—epistolary verses written by mailmen to recipients; conversations between couriers; points of understanding or chaos that flash out between nomadic souls. “In language at once direct and artful,” the author “memorably explores the question of how one might speak across the gulfs dividing humankind.” Olzmann’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 42.2.

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

New Books from NER Authors

February 2022

This winter has been a busy publication time for New England Review authors! Here are seven titles to help you transition from winter to spring.

Enduring and celebrated poet Carl Phillips combines new and older work from the previous thirteen years in a collection of poems that allows readers to revisit Phillips’ earlier work while witnessing the poet’s evolution to a contemporary presence in the American landscape. Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) stands as a testament to Phillips’ refusal of pessimism. This selection also includes Phillips’ recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures. Phillips has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in NER 39.1. 

In this short collection of poems, Rob Hardy’s new chapbook Shelter in Place (Finishing Line Press) showcases the present moment through keen observation of the natural world and examination of human nature. Hardy’s new collection challenges the contemplation of the future with a fearless examination of the present, offsetting dread and absence with the depth of the familiar. Hardy has appeared in multiple issues of NER. Most recently, Hardy’s nonfiction piece, “Deceit only was forbidden: A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde” appeared in NER 37.2.

Informed by the music that shaped him as a young man, The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (Penguin) recounts author Garrett Hongo’s audio obsession and decades-long quest for the perfect stereo setup. This memoir follows Hongo’s penchant for music from a young boy in Hawaii to his worldly adventures as an adult yearning to find his now-celebrated poetic voice. Hongo has appeared in multiple issues of NER. Most recently, Hongo’s poem, “Orison: February, Eugene, Oregon” appeared in NER 39.2.

Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin) meditates on processes of reckoning and recovery in a powerful testament to the human capacity for resilience and love. Tran’s poems take on forms that mirror the physical and emotional responses and transformation experienced in the aftermath of abuse in the form of intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism. Tran’s poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: Oil on Canvas: Pieter Bruegel: 1520” appeared in NER 42.2.

Maud Casey‘s latest book, City of Incurable Women (Bellevue Literary), reimagines the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. In an exploration of the female psyche, linked prose portraits restore the humanity of history’s long forgotten—those deprived of recognition and proper care due to their gender and class. Casey has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in NER 41.1.

After a compounding series of hardships—the transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—Brian Tierney reckons with the impacts of loss and pain in his debut book of poems, Rise and Float (Milkweed). Tierney’s poems provide a cathartic experience of remembrance and transcendence through lines of confession and intimacy. Tierney’s poem “Greystone Park” appeared in NER 38.1.

Lyrical and steamy, unflinching and diaristic, Richie Hofmann’s book of love poems catalog everyday experiences and encounters imbued with sex. In A Hundred Lovers (Knopf), Hofmann explores erotic desire and the complicated relationship between pleasure and pain. The speaker observes, “Our bodies manufacture their odors. I taste earth / on his skin.” These poems are filled with the tastes and textures of the carnal appetite. Hofmann’s poem “The House of Red and White Lions” appeared in NER 39.2.

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

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