New England Review

More April Books by NER Authors

“Mr. Holdefer is an abundantly gifted, witty writer. His creation, his delightful doppelganger Blast, is a funny, goofy, erudite, Baron Munchausen of magic.” —Tom Frame in Genii Magazine

From the publisher: Charles Holdefer has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world’s longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full color by Royce M. Becker.

Charles Holdefer, author of four novels, including The Contractor and Back In The Game, 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. Read his essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism,” published in NER 32.3 and his short story “Big and Nasty,” published in NER 37.1.

Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast is available from the publisher here, or can be found at your local independent bookstore.

“With Lynne Thompson’s new collection FRETWORK, one feels spurred on by the cherished care of the American emigrant story, which is to say, the buttressing and fortifying of the dream with all of its inglorious and joyous plots and twists.” —Major Jackson

Winner of the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

Lynne Thompson is the author of three chapbooks and the poetry collections START WITH A SMALL GUITAR, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and FRETWORK. She received Honorable Mention in Pushcart Prize XLII, an Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, and was a finalist for the 2018 Toi Derricotte/Cornelius Eady Chapbook Award. Thompson serves as Reviews & Essays Editor for the literary journal Spillway. Thompson was born in Los Angeles, California, and received a BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern Law School. Read her poem “Langston won’t stay in his grave,” in NER 39.4.

Fretwork can be purchased here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time.” — Diane Seuss

From the publisher: Paris Review Staff Pick; A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection; Recommended by Buzzfeed News; A Rumpus Book Club Pick; One of Nylon’s Best Books to Read in 2019; One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019.

Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her poem “The Price of Rain,” was featured in NER 37.4, and performed at the annual NER Out Loud event in February 2017. Listen to it here.

Soft Science can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“Nouns & Verbs is a lifelong manifesto on joy and vigor, a message in a bottle for all of us who ‘scrabble within the skin of time / like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor.’” —U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

From the publisher: A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 27.3 and 35.1. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.

Nouns & Verbs can be purchased from the publisher here or found at your local independent bookseller.

“‘To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices’ is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance. . . .What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” —Kaveh Akbar, The Paris Review

From the publisher: In Reenactments, Hai-Dang Phan grapples with the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as the son of Vietnamese refugees. Through a kaleidoscope of poetic forms, the past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles providing urgent perspectives on conflicts both private and public.

Hai-Dang Phanwas born in Vietnam in 1980 and grew up in Wisconsin. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2016, and the New England Review in NER 36.4 and 38.2. He is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. He currently teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Reenactments is his first book. Read his poem “My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look Like Tourists” here.

Reenactments can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.

“…Mills proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet’s ability to manage enormous shifts of scale… Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather’s ‘involvement in the Nagasaki mission,’ Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors’ accounts, and sifts through white sands…Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

From the publisher: Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge—particularly of the atomic bombs the US dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the US conducted throughout the twentieth century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author’s grandfather’s possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.

Tyler Mills is the author of two books of poems, Hawk Parable (winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 36.3. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center, and scholarships/fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee, the Chicago native is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University, editor-in-chief of The Account, and a resident of Santa Fe, NM.

Hawk Parable can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.

Awards and Honors for NER Authors

Congratulations to all of the NER authors who have recently been honored with awards and fellowships, including Owen McLeod, Penelope Cray, Mark Irwin, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tiana Clark, Charlie Clark, Geffrey Davis, Jenny Johnson, Sasha Pimentel, and Alison C. Rollins.

Owen McLeod’s poetry collection Dream Kitchen was awarded the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Judge Rosanna Warren said of the collection, “Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” The prize includes $1,000 and publication by The University of North Texas Press.
McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives; his poem “Uroboros,” was featured in NER 36.4.

Congratulations to Penelope Cray, whose short story collection Miracles Come on Mondays was selected as the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Judge Kazim Ali said of the collection, “These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. They are philosophical, funny, and frank. Like the fictions of Fanny Howe, Italo Calvino, and Rikki Ducornet, these stories rarely comfort. Then again, as one narrator observes, ‘When some alien sensation rises in the body, it unsettles rather than clarifies.’”
Cray holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home. Three of her pieces were featured in NER 36.4; read her story “Real and True” here, and listen to an oral performance of her story “The Red Painter,” delivered at NER Out Loud, here.

Frequent NER contributor and poet Mark Irwin was awarded the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry—an annual book contest sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at California State University, Fresno—for his collection Shimmer. The prize, named after the late poet Philip Levine who taught at Fresno State for many years and served as United States poet laureate from 2011-2012, includes a $2,000 prize and publication by Anhinga Press.
Irwin teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops in the Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California, and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Irwin has been a frequent contributor at NER since 1991; read his poem, “Three Panels,” featured in NER 22.1, here and check back in our 2019 summer issue for new poems from Shimmer.

A number of NER authors have been awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA Literature Fellowships program operates on a two-year cycle, alternating between prose and poetry fellowships, which offer $25,000 grants to published creative writers that enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. The 2019 NEA Creative Writing (Poetry) Fellowship recipients include:

Reginald Dwayne Betts (31.4, 34.1, 35.3)
Charlie Clark (38.4)
Tiana Clark (39.2)
Geffrey Davis (39.2)
Jenny Johnson (34.3-4)
Sasha Pimentel (36.4)
Alison C. Rollins (39.3)

Congratulations to all of the 2019 NEA Fellows!

New Books by NER Authors

“No one writes with a more acute attention to the immediate world than David Baker, but his relish of particulars is always subject to a broader meditation that looks behind and ahead… David Baker is one of our finest poets.” — Rodney Jones, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Elegy for the Southern Drawl and Village Prodigies

From the publisher: A sweeping poetic achievement, Swift represents David Baker’s evolution as one of American poetry’s most significant voices.

Gathering poems from eight collections—including the widely acclaimed Changeable Thunder (2001) and his masterful latest, Scavenger Loop (2015)—and adding three suites of new poems, David Baker proves himself once again “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker). With equal curiosity and candor, he explores the many worlds we all inhabit—from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighborhoods, villages, and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share.

David Baker’s last collection was Never-Ending Birds, which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His many honors include fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, and is the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Poetry and Professor of English at Denison University. His work appeared most recently in NER 37.1 and is forthcoming this summer.

Swift can be found at your local independent bookstore or online.

“Expertly orchestrated and engaging… Of the novels to come out of the #MeToo moment to date, none is more riveting, insightful, and unsettling.” — Kirkus (starred review)

From the publisher: An atmospheric and unsettling drama from a novelist acclaimed as “the literary descendent of Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith” (Boston Globe), Afternoon of a Faun combines a sharply observed study of our shifting social mores with a meditation on what makes us believe, or disbelieve, the stories people tell about themselves.

James Lasdun is the author of The Fall Guy, The Horned Man, and Seven Lies, several poetry and short story collections, and a memoir. He teaches at the New York State Writers Institute and lives in upstate New York. His writing appeared in NER 30.3.

Afternoon of a Faun can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

“These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don’t merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters―loss, desire, rage, becoming―and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense.” ―U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

From the publisher: Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s daring new poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of a body, where living things grow and wither―or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its most innovative… Jericho Brown is a poet of eros: here he wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, and several of The Best American Poetry anthologies. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), won the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award. He serves as poetry editor for The Believer. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta. His poems are featured in NER 28.1 (2007) and NER 35.3 (2014).

The Tradition can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“The poems weave recorded language from actors and soldiers with descriptions of the ‘games’ collected over Stone’s two-year anthropological study at Pineland…. Pineland’s setting allows the poet to explore the morality of war from a perspective that is analytical and viscerally haunting.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone’s two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at “Pineland,” a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine—alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart.

Nomi Stone is a poet, anthropologist, and author of a previous book of poems, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008). Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently in POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Stone has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, an MPhil in Middle East Studies from Oxford, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches at Princeton University and her ethnography in progress, Human Technology and American War, is a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier Series. Read her poem “Wonder Days,” originally published in NER 38.4.

Order Kill Class from the publisher here, or at your local independent book store.

“An older man, a younger woman, show biz, nakedness—but wait! This is the hilarious version with characters so sympathetic you root for them all, even the guy.” – Patricia Marx, New Yorker humorist and author of Him Her Him Again the End of Him

From the publisher: An incredibly timely, terrifically witty and moving debut about a young writers’ assistant on a late night comedy show and what transpires when she accepts an invitation from its enigmatic host to spend a long weekend at his mansion in Connecticut.
At once hilarious and poignant, brilliantly incisive and terrifically propulsive, Stay Up with Hugo Best is an incredibly timely exploration of sexual politics in the #MeToo age, and the unforgettable story of one young woman’s poignant stumbling into adulthood.

Erin Somers’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House Open Bar, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, the Cincinnati Review, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and was a 2016 NYC Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2016 Millay Colony resident. She lives in Beacon, New York, with her husband and daughter, and was an NER fiction reader from 2015-2017.

Stay Up with Hugo Best can be ordered here from the publisher, or purchased at your local independent bookseller.

“Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” —Rosanna Warren, judge of the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

From the publisher: Owen McLeod’s extraordinary debut maps the contours of an ordinary life: the rise and fall of romantic love, the struggle against mental illness, and the unending quest for meaning and transcendence. Ranging from sonnets and sestinas to experimental forms, these poems are unified by their musicality, devotion to craft, and openness of heart.

Owen McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives. He has held visiting positions at Yale and Mt. Holyoke. His poems have been published in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New England Review, in NER 36.4.

Dream Kitchen can be ordered here from the publisher, or purchased at your local independent bookstore.

NER Out Loud: The Podcast

New episode features stories by Geminder and Gorbunova

Masha Makutonina reading “Biomass,” by Alla Gorbunova

We’re delighted to bring you Episode 4 of the NER Out Loud podcast, which features two stories by NER authors read by students at Middlebury College.

Megan Job hosts this episode, with stories by Emily Geminder and Alla Gorbunova, read by Emily Ma and Masha Makutonina.

Emily Geminder’s story, “Phnom Penh 2012,” told from the collective “we” of young women reporters for the Cambodia Daily, is a haunting portrayal of the dangers and enticements of living for a short time in a new culture. Presented here in the captivating voice of actor Emily Ma.

Alla Gorbunova’s “Biomass,” translated from the Russian by Elina Alter, is a fable-like story of a marriage gone bad, from Gorbunova’s recent collection Ings & Oughts. Ukrainian vocal talent and Oratory Now coach Masha Makutonina offers her convincing rendition.

Listen on our website or download from iTunes.

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