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November 2020 - January 2021

New Books by NER Authors

February 5, 2021

November was a great publication month for NER author Dan O’Brien who published two books! A former Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art, O’Brien is an award-winning poet and playwright. His play Key West, “…balances the fine line between past and present, reality and shadow,” while The Angel in the Trees and Other Monologues showcases “…the humanity of lost souls longing to be heard.”

December brought a new book by Kat Meads, Dear DeeDee, a memoir-in-letters between Aunt K (the author) and her niece DeeDee. “A persistent theme: the inter-weavings of person and place.” Her essay “Things Woolfian,” is forthcoming in NER 42.1.

G.C. Waldrep’s seventh poetry collection, The Earliest Witnesses, begins where his prior collection left off: “This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again…” His “poems of witness” were published on January 1st, and bring testaments of the art of seeing into the new year. Waldrep has been published numerous times in NER, most recently in 37.1 and forthcoming in 42.2.  

You can shop the November books and more from fall 2020 on the New England Review’s Author Books Fall 2020 Bookshop page. The December and January books are on our Winter 2021 Bookshop page.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Dan O'Brien, G. C. Waldrep, Kat Meads

2021 Funding for New England Review

NER + NEA = More Support for Writers

February 4, 2021

We are delighted to announce that the New England Review will receive $10,000 in support from the National Endowment for the Arts for 2021, to publish and promote the journal and NER Out Loud programs.

New England Review will publish original poetry, fiction, essays, and works in translation in a quarterly journal, available in print and digital formats. The work will be promoted through NER’s active website, events, and monthly thematic e-mails. The NER Out Loud programs will include an event in which student actors rehearse and read works from NER to a live theater audience, as well as a series of podcasts, which will include readings and conversations by students as well as by the authors themselves. These audio components will broaden the audience for the excellent work published in the journal and bring it to life in new ways.

This project is among 1,073 projects across America totaling nearly $25 million that were selected during this first round of fiscal year 2021 funding in the Grants for Arts Projects funding category.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support this project from New England Review,” said Arts Endowment Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “New England Review is among the arts organizations across the country that have demonstrated creativity, excellence, and resilience during this very challenging year.”

Funds from the NEA go a long way in making arts organizations like the New England Review thrive and we are grateful for their support. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

Filed Under: News & Notes

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

February 1, 2021

Sarah Audsley photo by Anne Skidmore
Sarah Audsley, photo by Anne Skidmore

Do poets always feel envious of painters? Do painters ever envy poets? “Field Dress Portal” (NER 41.4) was not begun out of envy but out of admiration for the painting Field Dress by Lauren Woods. However, I would be lying if I did not admit to often being envious of my friends who are painters. With layers of color from an invented palette, the artist’s perception of the world is realized; sometimes, it seems like an easier task than the poet’s. I am making assumptions. Of course, I do not believe that either the painter or the poet ever endeavors because it is an easy task. Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

The ekphrastic poem has always eluded me. In graduate school, I failed to respond to a writing prompt by one of my favorite mentors. I never really tried again until this poem because, I think, the ekphrastic poem intimidates me. At its heart, I understand that ekphrasis—defined by The Oxford Classical Dictionary as “the rhetorical description of a work of art”—is supposed to describe and respond to a work of art beginning with the poet’s description. But how does one adhere to the mode’s expectations and, possibly, transcend the pitfall of mere description?

My response to Woods’s painting evolved over time, almost along with the artist’s reworking of her canvas. I watched the pictures of her progress on social media, the painting morphing over the course of several months. Revisions of the poem did not exactly follow the changes the painter made, but I reworked many drafts from August 2019 to the final proof for NER.

I wanted to step into the painting—to feel the tree limbs underfoot, to imagine inhabiting the lighted landscape the painter created, to understand the forest in a new way. A painting is 2-D, but how can words make it 3-D? I hope this poem enlivens the painting, creates a portal for the reader, encourages looking up the original artwork, and for the question the poem asks to be worthy of the leap. Also, I am aware that I cannot use the phrase “dead doe” without evoking “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, which, in my opinion, is inimitable—I bow down before her and her genius. Perhaps Woods’s painting reminded me of Kelly’s poem. And, in that regard, Noah Stezer’s poem “For All the Deer” in Sixth Finch provides another lens to ruminate on deer poems.

Most importantly, though, I consider myself a “rural poet.” What I mean by that self-designation is that I claim belonging in the rural landscape—Vermont, specifically—as a Korean American adoptee. Seeing someone like myself represented in a rural or wild landscape was not common when I was growing up. I claim the pastoral. The poem’s speaker’s identity is not disclosed, but it is important for the “I” to take up the rural descriptions, to walk through the painting, to make my own portal of belonging with words.

Filed Under: NER Digital, News & Notes, Writer's Notebook

Ayokunle Falomo

Alive in the Age of Worry

January 27, 2021

Poetry from NER 41.4 (2020)
Subscribe today!

Photo by Tamas Kolossa on Unsplash

Every poem an elegy,

Each moment of breath is a debt owed the dead.

To live is to die longing to hold and behold the face

Of the mystery that brought us here.

O, Holy: what keeps us here.

[Read more]

Filed Under: News & Notes, Poetry Tagged With: Ayokunle Falomo

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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