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I devoured this book! Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, a savvy business woman, a social and medicinal revolution: What’s not to love? —Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

From the publisher: During the ’70s in San Francisco, Alia’s mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town—and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple—in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia’s stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers’ distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS. Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

Alia Volz is a homegrown San Franciscan. Her writing appears in The Best American Essays 2017, the New York Times, Tin House, Threepenny Review, River Teeth, Nowhere magazine, Utne, New England Review, and the recent anthologies Dig If You Will the Picture: Writers Reflect on Prince and Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California. A 2018 MacDowell Colony fellow, Volz has also been an Artist in Residence with Writing Between the Vines and the Soaring Gardens Artists Retreat. The Squaw Valley Community of Writers awarded her the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship twice. She was runner-up of The Moth’s GrandSLAM Championship in 2014 and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her piece “Chasing Arrows” appears in NER 37.1.

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Two New Translations by Alexander Booth

Bossong is acclaimed in Germany for both her prose and poetry, but she remains one amongst many young German authors who have yet to be discovered through translation. —New Books in German

From the publisher: Forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver’s marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance to go to Rome to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, at one time the leading figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls obsessively in love with a young woman he has met, while continuing to focus his attention on the past: the frail and feverish Gramsci recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to save Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power, he falls in love with a Russian comrade instead. With a subtle sense of the absurd, Nora Bossong explores the conflicts between having intense feelings for another and fighting for great ideals. Translated by Alexander Booth.

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“I believe that one day, in another age, if there is another age, the poetry of Sandro Penna will be read by all and his greatness recognized by all.” —Natalia Ginzburg, author of Family Sayings

From the publisher: Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna’s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life. There is something ancient in Penna’s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile. Penna’s city is eternal—a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound—from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi, D’Annunzio, and Cavafy—the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna’s own. Translated by Alexander Booth.

Within the Sweet Noise of Life can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator who lives and works in Berlin.  A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations appeared in NER 37.3.

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[W]hat sets Shrapnel Maps apart from many of its contemporaries is its insistence on reaching for the light, in reaching for unity, in reaching for new definitions of peace and new definitions of a sustainable joy. —Cleveland Review of Books

From the publisher: Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’s fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including The Sound of Listening (essays), Pictures at an Exhibition (poems), the translation I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Award, the Alice James Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. Read his most recent poem in our current issue, NER 41.1. 

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“What a healing collection of poems Ahmed has given us.” —Patrick Rosal author of Brooklyn Antediluvian 

From the publisher: This collection juxtaposes text from Google Search autocomplete with the intimate language of prayer. Corporate jargon coexists with the incantatory and ancient ghazal form. [Dilruba] Ahmed’s second book of poetry explores the terrain of loss—of a beloved family member, of human dignity and potential, of the earth as it stands, of hope. Her poems weave mourning with the erratic process of healing, skepticism with an unsteady attempt to regain faith. With poems that are by turns elegiac, biting, and tender, Bring Now the Angels conveys a desire to move toward transformation and rebirth, even among seemingly insurmountable obstacles: chronic disease, corporate greed, environmental harm, and a general atmosphere of anxiety and violence.

Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book, Dhaka Dust, won the Bakeless Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Ahmed is the recipient of the Florida Review’s Editors’ Award and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize. Her poem “Underground” appears NER 39.2 and you can read her conversation with our Editorial Panel member Angela Narciso Torres here. 

Bring Now the Angels can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 

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“Transcending genre, these poems and lyric essays search for meaning amid tragedy” —Publishers Weekly 

From the publisher: Written during the trial for a close friend’s murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other . . . these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy.

Traci Brimhall is the author three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press); Our Lady of the Ruins, selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery, selected by Michelle Boisseau for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry, and she has received numerous fellowships. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. Her essay “Archival Voyeur: Searching for Secrets in Amelia Earhart’s Lost Poems” was originally published in NER 40.4 and can be read on LitHub. 

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“The novel feels unique, timely, and yet timeless. I couldn’t put it down.” —Elizabeth Farnsworth, author of A Train Through Time

From the publisher: Fleeing the ravages of wartime Vienna, Pepa and her family find safe harbor in the small town of El Castillo, on the banks of the San Juan River in Nicaragua. But Pepa’s life–including her relationship with local boy Guillermo–comes to a halt when her family abruptly moves to New York, leaving the young girl disoriented and heartbroken. As the years pass, Pepa’s and Guillermo’s lives diverge, and Guillermo’s homeland slips into chaos. Spanning generations and several wars, Only the River explores the way displacement both destroys two families and creates new ones, sparking a revolution that changes their lives in the most unexpected ways.

Anne Raeff’s short story collection, The Jungle Around Us, won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, was a finalist for the California Book Award, and was named one of the 100 Best Books of 2016 by San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel Winter Kept Us Warm was awarded the California Book Award’s Silver Medal in Fiction, was a finalist for the Simpson Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica, among other places. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and their two cats. Listen to an excerpt from her story “Chinese Opera,” which appeared in NER 37.2, in NER Out Loud.

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“Marked by moments of profound generosity and isolation, Scholarship Boy tells the story of race, family, and possibility in one boy’s life, while contemplating what’s left behind when one journeys between worlds.”—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread

From the publisher: In 1958, fourteen-year-old Larry Palmer left his parents and nine siblings at home in St. Louis and boarded a train to attend Phillips Exeter Academy. In Scholarship Boy Palmer reflects on his experiences as a young black boy growing up far from home, learning to fit into a white world without becoming estranged from his closely-knit family. The ninth of ten children, he illustrates the ways his sibling relationships shaped him as he was also being molded by his elite education. Palmer’s journey from being the “next-to-the-baby” of his family into adulthood reveals the personal and often hidden costs of cultural migration.

Larry I. Palmer holds degrees from Harvard University and Yale Law School, and he spent most of his career at Cornell University as a law professor and university administrator. He is the author of two scholarly works, Law, Medicine, and Social Justice and Endings and Beginnings. Scholarship Boy is his first book for a general audience. Palmer’s  reflections on his experience at Exeter, which appears in his book, was originally published in NER as “The Haircut” (NER 35.1).

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“Keep Moving speaks to you like an encouraging friend reminding you that you can feel and survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and Untamed

From the publisher: When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of several books of poetry including Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, The List of Dangers, and Nesting Dolls. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in the New York Times, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, and more. Read her poem “The Hum,” in NER 40.1.

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“Delight and humor abound… There is wistfulness in these poems, though they never become mired in shadows of what is lost or gone.” —Booklist

From the publisher: In The Park, his second book of poetry, John Freeman uses a park as a petri dish, turning a deep gaze on all that pass through it. In language both precise and restrained, Freeman explores the inherent contradictions that arise from a place whose purpose is derived purely from what we bring to it—a park is both natural and constructed, exclusionary and open, unfeeling and burdened with sentimentality. Throughout, Freeman wonders at how a park, being both curated and public, can be a nexus for a manifestation of great wealth inequality. Freeman plucks out difference in small daily dramas of people and animals only to dissolve it. Interspersed with meditations on love, beauty, and connection, The Park is a pacific and unflinching mirror cast upon a space defined by its transience.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing (forthcoming), as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Tales of Two Planets (forthcoming), on the climate crisis. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and the New York Times. He is the former editor of Granta and a writer-in-residence at New York University. His poem “Columbine and Rue” appears in NER 41.1.

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“Slow down. Find a quiet place. Read this book. It will not give you hope so much as comfort for your sorrow.”
— Ann Lauterbach, author of The Night Sky

From the publisher: Dan Beachy-Quick’s Arrows rests in the palm of the hand like a shard of ancient pottery, caressing antiquity into the present, reminding us of the impossibility of separating ourselves from outdated ways of knowing. Here, in increments, we are enchanted by the humming of bees and the vibrating strings of lyre and bow.  Through the winging and winding of violence, love and beauty, these poems pull and elongate various forms of harm. Yet, a shadow question haunts the book: Might some means of recovery be borne out of harm itself? Poems of desire and hurt, care and prayer answer in the affirmative, turning wound into song. In other words, within these covers, something entirely new and miraculous is offered the reader.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of six books of poetry, six chapbooks (two in collaboration with Srikanth Reddy), and two prose collections, as well as criticism and fiction. His work has won the Colorado Book Award, has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry, and has appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University, where he serves as assistant chair of the English Department and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. His poem “Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird” appears in NER 38.3 and his conversation with Rick Barot can be read here. His translations from Ancient Greek poetry are forthcoming in NER 41.2 this summer.

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“Spanning over a decade, these are poems of deep irreverence and relentless questioning… In these English translations, poet and musician Sze-Lorrain presents an arresting chronological sequence of Yin’s fresh and fearless revelations.”—Carolyn Kuebler

Yin Lichuan is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, film director, scriptwriter and one of the founders of the “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Born in 1973 in Chongqing, Sichuan province, she studied French at Beijing University before pursuing a graduate degree in filmmaking at École supérieure libre d’études cinématographiques (ESEC) in Paris. Her publications include several books of prose and fiction, as well as three volumes of poetry. Since 2006, Yin has devoted herself to filmmaking. She lives in Beijing.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist. Her recent book of poetry The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016) was a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work includes two earlier collections, My Funeral Gondola (2013) and Water the Moon (2010), and several books of translation of contemporary Chinese, American, and French poets. Her latest translation is Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019). Currently a Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, she lives in Paris.

Lichuan’s poems “Korea, North Korea” and  “A Flower,” both translated by  Sze-Lorrain, appear in NER 36.2 and can be read here.

Karma can be purchased from bookshop.org— support independent bookstores! 

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“Exceptional . . . Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the publisher: After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.

Victoria Chang’s books include Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love Love, will be published by Sterling Publishing in 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. You can listen to Chang’s most recent poems with NER, “Obit—Memory,” “Obit—Music,” and “Obit—Grief,” here: NER 38.3.

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“There is nothing like this book.” —Stephen Scully, author of Homer and the Sacred City

From the publisher: Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.

Stephanie Burt is a poet and critic and professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include Don’t Read Poetry, Advice from the Lights: Poems, and the essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in such publications as the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. She serves as poetry coeditor for the Nation. Her essay, “Skating with Delmore,” is forthcoming from NER this June.

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“Reading this book feels like some cosmic bang is conjuring up gravity inside your own brain, but whoa it was actually just John Gallaher who did that and he only used his words.”  —Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue

From the publisher: In Brand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about what fades and what remains. These poems offer snapshots of the poet’s memories of his adoption and childhood, his father’s heart attacks, his mother’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments. With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.

John Gallaher is the author of  In A Landscape (BOA, 2014), and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), which received the Levis Poetry Prize. He is also the co-author with G. C. Waldrep of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA, 2011), which was written in collaboration almost entirely through email. He is currently the co-editor of The Laurel Review and The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. He lives in Marysville, Missouri, where he is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University. You can read Gallaher’s most recent poem with NER, “Addenda to Your Emergency Plan,” in NER 36.3. 

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“Every sense engaged, each filament of intellect glowing, memory fully aflame—it’s not easy to survive such aliveness.” —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

From the publisher: In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.

William Fargason is the winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018–2019 Kingsbury Fellowship. He earned a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida. Fargason’s poems “Aquarium” and “Birthmark” appear in NER 35.1.

Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

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“Each stanza has a heuristic brilliance” —Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 

From the publisher: Insofar is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A–Z filing system. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others.  Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses.

Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry collections include Weather Eye Open (University of California Press); Green is the Orator (University of California Press); and Loom (Omnidawn). She has a BA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. The title poem of Insofar was first published in NER 38.3 and can be read here. 

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“Chatti turns fear and shame into empowerment in her unflinching debut” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the publisher: In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare” appears in NER 38.2.

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“The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score where superstition is prelude and memory is encore . . . Torres [pieces] together the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does through the veins in a leaf.”
—Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Hour of the Ox

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry. Hersecond collection, What Happens Is Neither, is forthcoming from Four Way Books (March 2021). Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and PANK. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She received First Prize in the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York). New City magazine named her one of Chicago’s Lit 50 in 2016. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in South Florida. In 2020, she joins the conference faculty of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO ​Poetry, and sat until recently on the editorial panel at NER.

To The Bone is available for FREE download at Sundress Publications. Preorder a signed print copy here. 

All proceeds to benefit RAICES, a nonprofit organization providing free or low cost legal services to refugees, immigrants, and their families. 

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“Fiona Sampson’s voice is something new and it’s a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read”— W. S. Merwin

From the publisher: Throughout, Sampson’s poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond – some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present.

Fiona Sampson has published twenty-nine books, most recently a critically acclaimed biography In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), and received a number of national and international awards for poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she’s received an MBE for services to literature, and been published in thirty-seven languages. She now lives in an old farm in a valley on the Welsh borders. Her poetry will appear in NER 42.1 (June, 2020).

Come Down can be purchased from Waterstones. 

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“Deep Gossip is beautiful and true, and alive with love, as life itself. The magnificence of Sidney Wade’s vision is unmatched in American Poetry.” —Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems 

From the publisher: Throughout her seven critically acclaimed collections, Sidney Wade has established herself as a poet with a serious but light touch, capable of the clarity and inventiveness it takes to work a problem to both pleasure and resolution.  Inspired by landscape, language, music, and living things, as well as the occasional bout of political outrage, Deep Gossip is a smart collection.

Sidney Wade is a poet, translator, and professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Florida. She is the author of seven collections of poetry: Bird Book, Straits & Narrows, Stroke, Celestial Bodies, Empty Sleeves, Green, and From Istanbul/İstanbul’dan. Her poems “Byzantium” and “Barn” appeared in NER 17.4.

Deep Gossip can be purchased here from Bookshop.org— support independent bookstores!

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[De Jarnatt’s] stories . . . have violence at their centers and are richly textured—the prose being ornate, rococo, thickly detailed.” —Janice Obuchowski, author of “Constellations” and “Mountain Shade”

From the publisher: Grace for Grace brings celebrated cult filmmaker Steve De Jarnatt’s distinctive voice and cinematic vision to the page. Lush inner lives, idiosyncratic syntax, and sweeping scale characterize these wildly imaginative stories, which present characters in search of meaning and belonging, and often, at the same time, redemption and revenge.

Steve De Jarnatt‘s fiction has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Short Stories, among others. He has worked as a writer, director, and producer in film and television for three decades, most notably writing and directing the cult classic Miracle Mile. His fiction includes two stories in NER, “Wraiths in Swelter” (NER 36.2) and “Her Great Blue” (NER 34.1).

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“The queen is back with the exact novel we need in this fraught era. A powerful testament of witness and humanity written with audacity and authority.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

From the publisher: The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves, but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. Alvarez’s essay “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical” appeared in NER 21.4.

Afterlife can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 

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The Age of Phillis is the finest work on early African-American life I’ve ever read . . . This is a book to be taught, studied, held, absorbed, and treasured.” —Joanna Brooks, author of American Lazarus and Why We Left

From the publisher: In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet whose work examines culture, religion, history, and family. She is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Glory Gets, and the recipient of the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, she teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is a professor of English. Her fiction “Soon One Morning” appears in NER 25.4.

The Age of Phillis can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 

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