New England Review

Books by NER Authors

December 2019

Tonino’s infectious love of the outdoors…should inspire us to explore the places just outside our own front door. —E/The Environmental Magazine

From the publisher: At eighteen, Vermont native Leath Tonino ventured west to attend college in Colorado. Upon hearing his destination, many of Tonino’s friends and family predicted that he’d never come back; he’d make the “land of endless space and sky, its ranges and their storms” his home. “The West will swallow you,” one said, in a tone that felt like part warning and part prophecy.

More than a decade later Tonino continues to call Vermont his home. But despite his love of New England and his admiration for writers who sing the praises of their native ground, he concedes that he is, as Gary Snyder once phrased it, “promiscuous with landscapes.” Tonino has spent the intervening years since college traversing “the alphabet of the American West from AZ to CA to UT to WY” and writing about its mysterious and powerful beauty. The resulting musings are collected in The West Will Swallow You, the title of which is a nod to words that, in many ways, turned out to be true.

Leath Tonino, a writer from Vermont, has also worked as a wildlife biologist in Arizona, a blueberry farmer in New Jersey, and a snow shoveler in Antarctica. His essays, reported stories, and interviews appear in magazines such as Outside, Men’s Journal, Orion, Tricycle, Utne Reader, The Sun, and NER 33.3, and his essay “Beach Reading” was recently featured on NER Digital.

The West Will Swallow You can be purchased from Trinity University Press or from your local bookstore.

Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots

From the publisher: Erich Ambrose fools people for a living. It’s a family tradition. But when a party stunt goes disastrously wrong, he finds himself in deep trouble, on the run through Chicago streets and northern woods, matching wits with the FBI and national security agents and money launderers, all while trying to please a violent homecoming queen and a badass rabbit. Humorous and probing, Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots is a story of how our past haunts the present, and how the cruelest tricks are the ones we play on ourselves.

Chalres Holdefer, author of five novels, including Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast (2019) and Dick Cheney in Shorts (2017), 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, and his story “The Raptor” won a Pushcart Prize. His essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism” was published in NER 32.3, and his short story “Big and Nasty” appeared in NER 37.1.

Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots can be purchased at SPD Books or your local independent bookseller.

Books by NER authors

October 2019

The Professor of Immortality is a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom. It’s also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest and most companionable novelists out there. —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

From the publisher: Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. In the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death, Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that her son might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him.

Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York; the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic; and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Pollack has published many times in NER, and her most recent contribution, “Ranch House,” can be found in NER 32.4.

The Professor of Immortality can be purchased through HarperCollins Publishers or from your local bookstore.

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

From the publisher: Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Betts has been published in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

Felon can be purchased directly from the publisher or from your local, independent bookstore.

Impressive in its precise articulation and range of insights, [Timothy] Donnelly’s dazzling third collection extends the thematic reach of his 2010 Kingsley Tufts Award–winning The Cloud Corporation. Charting the underbelly of Western capitalism, the speakers in Donnelly’s poems locate the imperialist impulse in humanity’s distant origins. From gut flora to galaxies, these poems offer glimpses “that waver like air above lit candles,” restoring meaning to the world in the process. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage point—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great. 

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family. His work appears in NER 40.1.

The Problem of the Many can be bought from Wave Books or from your local bookstore.

From the publisher: Through vivid imagery that celebrates the world, Boruch meditates on memory and time, and the process of living with, and working through, grief. Boruch’s poems challenge typical associations with the subject, exposing new facets of a universal feeling.

Marianne Boruch has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and often in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Boruch has published frequently in NER, most recently with the essay “In the Archives of the Humanly Possible: Two Rooms” in NER 37.1.

The Anti-Grief can be purchased through Copper Canyon Press or from an independent bookstore.

In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old. —The New York Times

From the publisher: In celebration of the prize’s centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Carl Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and has served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets since 2010. His own books of poetry include Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. He is a frequent contributor to NER, and his work appears most recently in NER 37.1.

Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets includes works by NER authors such as Maura Stanton, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholas Samaras, Richard Siken, Valerie Wohlfeld, Ellen Hinsey, Fady Joudah, Eduardo C. Corral, Noah Warren, and others. This anthology can be purchased from the publisher.

Books by NER Authors

NER Author books – Sept 2019

Ye Lijun’s quiet, powerful poems accrete from places, memories, affect, and ideas unique to the poet. Translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a gifted poet herself, creates an English-language voice for Ye Lijun that has all the grace and surprise of the original. —Thomas Moran

From the publisher:  In this remarkable English debut, award-winning Chinese contemporary poet Ye Lijun offers readers a lyrical diorama of nature and the inner world. By turns intimate and profound, Ye’s poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s masterful translations make music of everyday silences, and illuminate the invisible openings in our lives. In this vital collection by one of China’s essential literary voices, each encounter is an invitation, wherein a village, a nest, a telescope, or a book proves to be a transient guide to the unknown.

Ye Lijun is an award-winning Chinese contemporary poet and author of Flower Complex (2014), Passing by Thousands of City Lights in Black Night (2009), and Survey (2005). Ye has received several literary honors in China, including the 2007 Poetry Tour Award.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of the poetry books The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), My Funeral Gondola (El Leon Literary Arts, 2013), and Water the Moon (2010). She was named the 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. A zheng harpist and widely published translator, she lives in Paris where she works as an editor. Her translations of Yin Lichuan’s poetry appeared in NER 36.2 and her translation, with Christina Cook, of Greta Knutson’s story “The Black Virgin” appears in NER 40.3.

This book can be purchased at SPD Books or your local bookseller.

Outtakes, B-Sides, and Demos by Joshua Harmon

From the publisher: Outtakes, B-Sides, and Demos is a chapbook of creative nonfiction that combines autobiography, cultural criticism, and music writing. Harmon’s playlist includes New Order, Led Zeppelin, Brian Eno, Public Image Limited, and others.

Joshua Harmon is the author of the novel Quinnehtukqut, the short story collection History of Cold Seasons, and the poetry collections Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie and Scape, and the essay collection The Annotated Mixtape, a selection of which was published on NER Digital as “From negative ∞ to 0.” His essay “Speculative Markets and the 7-inch Single” appeared in NER 32.3, and his essay “Fugitive Music” appeared in NER 30.4.

This book can be purchased at GSU Mall or your local bookseller.

In this erudite and ever-dexterous 10th collection, Bierds poignantly juxtaposes terror with beauty . . .—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Focusing on figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and the World War One poets, The Hardy Tree examines power, oppression, and individual rights in ways that reverberate through our lives today. Uniting these themes is the issue of communication―the various methods and codes we use to reach one another. Backed by Bierds’ intensive research and woven with scientific evidence, she pushes us to consider our futures in direct conversation with the past.

Linda Bierds‘s many collections of poetry include Flights of the Harvest Mare (1985); Heart and Perimeter (1991); The Ghost Trio (1994), which was a Notable Book Selection by the American Library Association; The Seconds (2001); First Hand (2005); Flight: New and Selected Poems (2008); and Roget’s Illusion (2014) was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award. Bierds is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the MacArthur Foundation. She has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her poem “April” was published in NER 13.2 and was republished in 2015 as an NER Classic. The title poem of this new collection appeared in NER 37.3.

This collection can be purchased at Copper Canyon Press or your local bookseller.

Books by NER Authors

September 2019

Forage by Rose McLarney

Elegant . . . readers will revel in the work’s undeniable beauty and smarts. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: These intricately sequenced poems take up everything from animals’ symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change to how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. At the confluence of these poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record–and augment–the beauty of the world in which we live.

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the 2014 National Poetry Series, and Forage, forthcoming in 2019, both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way Books, 2012). A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, which she co-edited, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. Rose is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and co-editor-in-chief of Southern Humanities Review. Her work appears most recently in NER 40.1.

Forage can be purchased from Penguin Random House or at your favorite independent bookstore.

Otremba’s command of form and structure, and the scope of his exploration, make this a worthwhile outing. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: The poems in Paul Otremba’s Levee explore the intersection between the ecological, the political, and the personal in a world built on oil and greed. The city of Houston is at once backdrop and metaphor for the ways in which violence—both natural and manmade—have become part and parcel of twenty-first century life. “It’s a luxury to be this calm,” Otremba writes in the opening poem, a held-breath between the disastrous effects of hurricanes and cancer. Yet Otremba’s exquisite lines manage to wrest meaning from the devastation wrought by both global warming and a terminal illness: “If there is a lesson / on how not to worry, it’s that you’re not stuck only being one thing, /the multitudes in me and the multitudes in you.”

Paul Otremba is the author of two poetry collections, The Currency (Four Way Books, 2009) and Pax Americana (Four Way Books). His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in such places as Kenyon Review, Witness, Literary Imagination, Southwest Review, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Post, Poetry Daily, and American Poets in the 21 Century: The New Poetics. His work appears in NER 39.3.

Levee can be purchased directly from the publisher, or from your local bookstore.

Image result for before our eyes eleanor wilner

Before books, the ancients had their memory theaters to treasure and keep in reach all they knew. Eleanor Wilner’s memory theater is a vast and glorious gathering of years of poems that question, deepen, rage, inspire, and connect. Working from myth and history, through grief and edgy expanse, Wilner is our oracle, the generous troubling overvoice of our age, our light, our dark, and our best. —Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief

From the publisher: Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.

Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. In 2019, she received the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, the highest award presented by the Poetry Society of America. Her other awards include the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and her work appears in many anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia. Her work appears in NER 35.4.

Before Our Eyes can be purchased from the publisher or at your local bookstore.

These essays, in addition to being resonant in their own right, will also move readers to recollect stories of their own parents. —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Image result for Apple, Tree book writers on their parents

From the publisher: In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree. Twenty-five writers deftly explore a trait they’ve inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today—how it shifts their relationship to that parent (sometimes posthumously) and to their sense of self… Together, their pieces form a prismatic meditation on how we make fresh sense of ourselves and our parents when we see the pieces of them that live on in us.

NER author Angelique Stevens‘s essay is featured in this anthology. Her nonfiction can be found in or is forthcoming in Booth Magazine, Cleaver, Chattahoochee Review, and a number of anthologies. Her essay “All the Grains of Sand” won the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing 2018 grand prize. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and finds her inspiration in wandering—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger. She is currently writing a travel memoir about her trip to South Sudan and her experiences growing up in New York State. Her reflection, “The Only Light We’ve Got,” was published in NER 40.2.

Apple, Tree: Writers on the Their Parents can be purchased from the publisher or at your local bookstore.

Gómez’s deft control of language—the syntax is nimble, the diction is zoetic—brings us close to the boundless resilience that helps us survive, change. —Eduardo C. Corral

From the publisher: In Hijito—selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize—Carlos Andrés Gómez writes of brutality and beauty with the same urgency and with a truth that burns readily; it is a collection of survival instincts. As a vital and tender exploration and deconstruction of contemporary society, his poetry engages with America’s ever-changing landscape and the ways in which race, gender, and violence coalesce. Called “powerful, truthful, and sublime” by Cornel West, Gómez’s words are a necessary paean to hope and courage in the modern world.

Carlos Andrés Gómez‘s is the winner of the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Yale Review, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape(Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Gómez is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poem “Last Sundays at Bootleggers” appears in the current issue of NER (40.2).

Hijito can be purchased online from SPD Books or at your local bookstore.

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