New England Review

Introducing NER 43.2

Summer 2022

Readers will find plenty of places to go in the summer issue of NER—now shipping from the printer—and like true travelers will find expectations upended and experiences that shift their ways of seeing.

Take a look inside our international feature on new writing from Lebanon, in which guest editor Marilyn Hacker gathers a polyglot and multinational range of writers, including poets Zeina Hashem Beck, lisa luxx, and Omar Sabbagh, and many new writers in translation, among them Taghrid Abdelal (trans. Fady Joudah) and Hilal Chouman (trans. Suneela Mubayi).

Or travel into the wilds of the imagination with new stories by David Ryan, Roy Kesey, and Kosiso Ugwueze and with poets Gillian Osborne, Corey Van Landingham, and Steven Duong—among many others. New essays by Maud Casey and Sarah Fawn Montgomery turn new lenses on #MeToo and climate doom, while Ben Miller and Marianne Boruch look at the origins of artistic experience.

And that’s just some of what you’ll find in NER 43.2. Take a look at the full table of contents to preview some of what’s on offer and order a copy for yourself, or subscribe, right here.

Behind the Byline

Justin Balog

NER poetry reader Liza Watkins talks with poet Justin Balog about abstraction and intimacy, the responsibility of poetry (if any!), his two poems in NER 43.1, and his artistic influences.

Liza Watkins: I’m curious about your writing process. Near the end of “Observation on Discovery,” a poem that moves between images of an art installation and those of domestic life on a Catalonian boulevard, the speaker observes that “The narrowness between buildings makes the perfect telescope.” When you set out to write, is there generally something you already know you’re trying to see more clearly within the confined space of a poem, or do you proceed with a more exploratory frame?

Justin Balog: Yes, this is such a lovely first question, thank you! Whenever I’m thinking about the writing process I’m reminded of the framework that Louise Glück laid out in her essay “Education of the Poet”—essentially, there are those writers whose initial stages of writing are indebted to witness and there are those that rely on sketch, which is to say the non-anecdotal. I think, surely for most of us, that the idea can lie somewhere in between, that perhaps we are compelled by some experience and, in the way I think about it, the emotive intricacies and nuances can become more alive through sketch.

The contextual factors of this particular poem stem from a set of annoying mishaps—in the beginning days of my first-ever trip abroad, the airline I flew with permanently lost my luggage and then the next day, my and a friend’s Airbnb key was stolen. It’s now a great and funny story, but in the moment there were a lot of uncertainties and annoyances, so I would describe the impetus here as beginning in experience. But, in my process of writing, I like to let association, what we might label here as a type of “sketch,” allow for the opportunity of moments of unexpected insight (here, the art exhibit or the streets of Barcelona as you mention in your example). It’s these links in association that found, what I would view, a (re)discovery of smallness in the line that you’ve quoted from the poem. In my work, I like to think about scale and I view the craft of writing as a funnel (a telescope, we could say, might be its own type of funnel as well!). I think about abstraction (emotion, an idea, or something esoteric in nature) as existing at the large end of the funnel, and, through the stem, we translate those abstractions through some type of experience, memory, or lived virtue, and then in the small end, finally, to intimacy, self-knowing, learning, or a moment of transcendence (this idea of the funnel can be extrapolated too to images, in this case, how one section of the universe is made small by the walls of buildings). In short, I would say it’s a little bit of both—I know that there are ideas I try to see more clearly in experience, but that it is moments of association and living that allow for the exploratory, the sketches, to unfold.    

LW: I like this notion of the writing process as a funnel from abstraction to intimacy, with what you are calling “lived virtue” translating from the large opening to the stem. And I can see your interest in scale in operation in “Abstract,” which contrasts the small scale of the houseplant with the unfathomably large frame of global warming. In beautiful and enigmatic lines, the speaker states, “If I could, I wouldn’t say anything / to Greenland and its disappearing ice,” but of course the poem does say something. Could you share your thoughts about the responsibility of a poem to get a specific message across or prompt a particular thought process? I’m also curious how this might relate to the formal choice to include significant moments of silence throughout “Abstract.”  

JB: This is a complicated but important question, I’ll try my best to answer. The responsibility of action for poetry exists, I think, on different levels. At the very top, you have what Heaney might have described as a “lyric action”; a responsibility meant to achieve some sort of outward affect. The consequences in this type of responsibility is frequently dire; it’s an extreme and dangerous form of a type of responsibility, a type of political protest. At the other end we have another type of witness, what I would call an emotive vicariousness; internally, we must feel and be compelled toward consequence before we are spurned to act. I did an interview with Jane Hirshfield nearly two years ago now and asked a derivation of this similar question about her poems, coincidentally, that also tackled the climate crisis. She used a term, which I think is useful here, about responsibility, specifically centered around climate change, that a poem is a “vessel of felt response.” There are a lot of different types of poetic responsibility, but those are at least some of my brief thoughts about the responsibility of a poem to achieve a particular message more broadly.

Obviously, the first type of responsibility is not what is happening here. I’m happy that you think “Abstract” says something. This was a poem that I wrote back at the beginning of the pandemic under a weight of existentialisms that, in different ways and for different reasons for different people, became incredibly even more cumbersome during those first months of COVID; everything from health to the economic, racial, environmental, and political grief of what was happening.

I think this might be where the formal choice of silence that you’ve identified comes from. It felt right to have the poem pause almost out of sheer enormity for the situation. The reason that I say it makes me happy that you think the poem says something is because I guess you can say something out of sheer hopelessness, but in a way, I think, that very hopelessness can eschew any type of future “responsibility” as we might call it here. The responsibility of action is a difficult question because, at least for me, in this instance, it wasn’t an expectation I held for the work. What I’m trying to say is that the responsibility here, at the time I wrote this, was entirely self-centered, only just a manifestation and a prompting of my particular thought process during that period of time. Responsibility can take on its own forms, outside of intent or private sphere. It’s often attributed to Yeats, but an epigraph in his 1916 collection Responsibilities reads “In dreams begins responsibility.” We could quibble and muse about the mysteriousness of that epigraph until the end of time but responsibility, at least, has the tendency to evolve from within. 

LW: Thanks so much for entertaining what was rather a monumental question, but one I’m always interested in exploring with other writers. I love the idea of quiet poems being generated out of a hopeless time, and how the emotive vicariousness of the work, as you say, can open a space of personal intent, however unconscious. And I am so glad to know about the epigraph “in dreams begins responsibility,” which makes me think of a gorgeous line from “Observation on Discovery,” “my heart / felt weightless as a toolbox.” In fact, in both poems in this NER issue you explore aspects of being tethered versus being weightless or free. When you write do you work with a collection in mind, or are you less project oriented?  

JB: It’s always so enlightening to hear others connect the dots the work lays out, these things always have such a way of remaining elusive to ourselves. One of the many privileges of my MFA experience was that I had a fellowship year to refine and work solely on the collection that I had turned in as my thesis project. It’s now been about two years since my fellowship ended and I wrote these poems under the umbrella of that collection, as I have been doing with everything I’ve written since. I go back and forth, I think as most of us do, on whether I should throw the whole thing out and try again or continue to work on it and see what other insights and perspective time has to offer (I am leaning toward eventually doing the former, but that changes depending on the time of day). Projects always demand an aesthetic focus, and that focus can be helpful for guiding us, but that demand sometimes has a way of narrowing possibility and vision, at least for me. I think that I’m slowly learning the importance of that balance, but for now I think I’ll keep (hopefully not hopelessly) revisiting the collection until I feel I have no more darts left to throw at the wall.

LW: I’m glad you’re still throwing darts at the wall! Have there been particular poets or visual artists that seem to be in conversation with your work or that you’ve found inspiring for this collection as currently conceived? “Observation on Discovery”engages in a kind of ekphrasis, and I’m curious whether this is a regular part of your writing process. 

JB: So I have to admit, I’m not terribly involved in the arts world outside of writing (although I wish I was!). I come from a more science-y educational background and the visual arts are something that has remained out of grasp for me but that I’ve always had a deep respect for. I try to get to museums or exhibits every once and awhile to make up for my very pedestrian knowledge of the arts, but I’m not much better for my attempts. To go back to the previous point about the experiential in the writing process, the particular art exhibit referenced in the poem is from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona—it was literally a hanging bedframe and I thought it was sort of nice to pair that with the clothes strung out to dry over balconies and alleys (I have a picture of it, but I can’t seem to find the name of the artist to credit them for the work). That being said, if there is ever a piece of art, or anything of influence, that I see and think it could work nicely in a poem I do draw a fair amount of inspiration from it. I love to think about the associations between objects, ideas, facts, etc.

In terms of particular poets that I feel have guided my sensibility and aesthetics, hands down, Kathleen Graber’s work has by far been the most influential for me (I think her collection Eternal City is one of the best collections of poems I’ve ever read). Another big influence of mine is the work of Lucie Brock-Broido. I think both of their work has been vital in the way that I understand associative logic in poems and how that can be brought out through lyric. Some other favorites of mine who have informed my own sensibilities are Arthur Sze, Anne Carson, Catherine Barnett, Alberto Rios, and Hannah Sullivan—I of course could go on, but I’ll limit myself to only a couple! 

LW: I’ve actually been wondering whether the installation in “Observation on Discovery” could be the one from the cover and titular poem in Fanny Howe’s Come and See. It’s a piece called Third World Extra Virgin Dreams 1997 by Dr. Suzann Victor. Fanny Howe is another master of associative logic, and it would be interesting if you both chose the same image to work with in a poem. 

JB: Yes no kidding! That would have been such a fun coincidence, but sadly it is not the same one (although I guess there is a common theme among floating bedframes and poems it seems!). 

LW: Ah, well I’m sorry I can’t be helpful in identifying the artist, but I’ll be on the lookout for more installation-inspired poems about the place we dream. Speaking of dreams, I understand you’re just finishing a master’s program in education. Congratulations! When you’re not busy reading and writing, what captures your interest or helps you unwind? 

JB: Yes that is right, I’ll be finishing up my second masters here at the end of the month, which I’m very happy and excited about! I was just in a year-long program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education; it all went by so quickly, I feel like I blinked and it’s all over now. When I’m not busy with school, reading or writing, it sounds cliché, but I love spending time with my friends or traveling. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of really great people in my life, they are a big source of energy for me and spending time with them helps me recharge and unwind (obviously this has been made extremely difficult the past two years). Outside of that I’m also a huge sports fan, me and all of my family are from Chicago and have been raised to love everything (Chicago) sports, although my main sport is soccer so I’m very excited for the World Cup coming up here in the fall. I also love to unwind with absolutely, mind-numbing dating shows—I don’t watch much TV or anything, but I get unhealthily invested in The Bachelor and, more recently, The Ultimatum on Netflix, they are my guilty pleasures. I try to carve out as much space for different interests, because I don’t think writing would really ever happen for me if I didn’t do plenty of living too!

Liza Watkins is a poet and social worker from Louisiana. Her current work reflects ongoing research in Gulf Coast communities and wildlife refuges. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston, where she was a teaching fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Paris Review and Massachusetts Review. Liza lives in New York City.

Behind the Byline

Rob Franklin

NER fiction editor Ernest McLeod speaks with writer Rob Franklin—whose story “Phoenix” appears in NER 43.1—about restraint, intimacy in the internet age, and queer kinship.

Ernest McLeod: “Phoenix” opens with the story’s narrator, David, recalling how much a particular writer meant to him: “He was my writer. The writer whose verse I could recite on loop, by memory, whose words were literally etched into my skin.” When a friend gives David the writer’s book, he “stayed up all night that night reading with the sort of urgency one only musters at sixteen, when life still appears to bloom for you alone.” These lines tap into the special way art or artists can speak to us when we’re young and trying to discover our place. It led me to reflect on my own formative artistic influences. Were there writers or other artists who really rocked your youthful world and did you have any of them in mind while writing “Phoenix”?  

Rob Franklin: There were definitely a bunch of inspirations for the character Roland, mainly my favorite gay writers. Both ones who loomed large in my adolescence, like Richard Siken and Edmund White, and ones, like ​​David Wojnarowicz and Hervé Guibert, whom I first read more recently and to whom I felt an immediate (and perhaps unearned) kinship. 

I was also thinking a lot about parasocial relationships and fandom in the internet age. There’s a poet, my generation, whose work I first encountered on Tumblr, years ago when I was a freshman in college — he had this project where he invited strangers to answer a series of questions about sex over email, then replied with answers of his own. A kind of experiment in intimacy and the internet. It’s funny because he’s now a friend of mine, but I’ve still never told him that I was a participant, that we corresponded many years before meeting. 

EM: David, at loose ends just after the quarter-century mark of his life, learns from social media that his writer has had a “minor stroke.” He ends up responding to a Facebook request for volunteer visitors to help Roland (the writer) in his recovery. Impulsively, David buys a one-way ticket from New York to Phoenix, where Roland lives, and settles into a cheap Airbnb. Phoenix gives the story its title and provides such an interesting and unexpected setting for the story. David muses that Phoenix resembles a strip mall or “to be less generous but perhaps more accurate, the parking lot of a strip mall” and notes how the “sun glared with a punishing, almost biblical intensity.” How did you arrive at Phoenix and how do you see it functioning as the story’s backdrop? 

RF: I’ve actually never been to Phoenix, or Arizona at all, so much of that landscape imagery came from Google Street View. I was drawn, just imagistically, to a desertous, barren landscape. Also because the speaker, David, has a sort of snide New York smugness about the rest of the country, it felt fun to filter that landscape through his consciousness. To frame it as a wasteland. 

But once I’d set it there, and added that to my doc as the work-in-progress title, I did start to think more about the double-meaning of Phoenix—the mythic bird that rises from its ashes. It seemed suited to a story about stealing from your heroes, about youth and aging, illness and death. So the title ended up inspiring the final scene in which David walks away with the stolen manuscript. 

EM: One of the things I appreciated about “Phoenix” on first read was its restraint. David and Roland are guarded with each other and, as a narrator, David withholds as much as he reveals. I felt that this restraint gave the story a mysterious, almost coded quality, leaving a lot between the lines. I know during the editing process we talked a little about David’s motivations and a balance in the narrative between opacity and transparency. Can you talk about the balance of stated and unstated, as it relates to “Phoenix” and/or to your writing in general?  

RF: That was a tricky balance to strike, as I don’t think David’s motivations are entirely legible even to him. For instance, there’s clearly something a bit sinister about his relationship to the writer and how he capitalizes on the man’s poor health to get close to him—but I think David would defend his intentions throughout most if not all of the story. I’m very drawn to characters like that, for whom there’s a gap between their self-perception and their actions. Characters who act on strange impulses and only figure out their motivations, bit by bit, in the aftermath. 

EM: David feels such an intimate kinship with Roland’s writing, yet within the intimacy of Roland’s house, there’s a real distance between them. David also has to confront the divide between Roland’s work, which is suspended in time, and Roland himself, who is physically diminished by time. I’m fascinated by these paradoxes within the writer/reader relationship. What inspired you to explore these themes and, since it’s Facebook that brings David and Roland together, how do you think social media influences how we relate to our artistic idols? 

RF: It’s an age-old paradox, right—the (often vast) distance between the artist and their work. Definitely one I’ve witnessed in real life, though not with quite the intensity or disappointment of David. But I think it’s only worse now that so many of our relationships, real and imagined, are mediated by technology. Virtual access of the kind David has to Roland gives this illusion not just of proximity but ownership. He feels owed something, precisely because he’s cathected his identity onto this writer he loves, a projection of his own desire for depth, and he can’t quite square that with the man he encounters in Arizona. It creates a dissonance, which, by the end, he can only process as rage.  

EM: Throughout the story, David compares his own life to Roland’s—or, Roland’s as it’s presented on the page many years earlier. We learn that Roland’s output was limited and centered on “his lover—the one who’d died, the one he’d written about in ways that still broke my heart and against which all my small loves had been measured.” Some of my favorite passages in the story reference Roland’s work, through David’s perceptions. They’re quite minimal, yet I think the story’s success hinges on them. Was it a challenge to capture the historical and emotional weight of Roland’s work (on David) in a few lines, and what were you striving for tonally in these passages?

RF: Absolutely, it was one of the primary challenges in writing the story—to communicate what would have been so weighty and impactful about Roland’s work without having it on the page. I think about that a lot with films and books that hinge on the audience’s belief in the strength of a particular performance or piece of art without actually showing it. It doesn’t always work. In this story, I tried to communicate something of Roland’s style by filtering it through the psyche of a speaker who considers himself a student, a “devotee.” So what matters, more than the actual work, is David’s perception of it. Tonally, I wanted to use those sparse lines and sections to communicate a grandness or depth in scope. The hold something can have on you simply for its having been your first. 

There’s a moment, late in the story, after David finds the unpublished manuscript and takes it to read in bed, that I thought of as a fugue-like collapse of that articulation of style, where it becomes felt more than understood, and David’s voice can merge with his hero’s. 

EM: You’re an emerging writer who has published poetry and short fiction. I believe you’re working on a novel? How was it navigating the leap from shorter pieces to a long project? 

RF: Yes, I am! Right now, I’m editing a manuscript for a novel, which is at a very high-level about race, class, and addiction. I think that with poetry, short fiction, and now this longer project, I’m often circling themes of intimacy and identity formation—how young people seek out experiences with which to define themselves and often hurt others in the process. What I’m working on now is no exception, though I do think it’s a stylistic leap. There’s a more essayistic bent to much of the prose that just emerged as I was thinking and writing about the nature of narrative: what stories we tell about ourselves, what stories our bodies tell without permission. 

Ernest McLeod is a writer and artist living in Middlebury and Montréal. He has served on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a longtime NER reader before becoming fiction editor in 2018. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His writing and photography have appeared in The Sun, Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction, Salon, F-Stop, JPG, File, as well as in numerous Vermont publications.

Alumni Reading

Middlebury Reunion 2022

New England Review is pleased to announce the return of its annual gathering of Middlebury College alumni and faculty authors during Middlebury’s reunion weekend, on Saturday, June 11, at 1:00-2:00 p.m. Axinn Center, Room 229, Middlebury College. For reunion attendees only.

This year brings a range of accomplished alumni—Richard Hawley (’67), Suzanne Wise (’87), Alicia Wright (’11.5), and Matthew Wilson (’22)—as well as faculty and alumna author Stacie Cassarino (’97). They will read from a range of poems, stories, essays, and more.

Stacie Cassarino (’97 & Visiting Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures) is the author of the poetry collection Zero at the Bone (2009), which received the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award, and a critical work, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2018). She was awarded the 92Y “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Agni, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont with her three daughters and teaches at Middlebury College.

Richard Hawley (’67), a writer of fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, has published more than thirty books and monographs. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, American Film, Commonweal, America, Orion, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Christian Science Monitor, and others.  He is the former headmaster of University School in Cleveland and the founding president of the International Boys Schools Coalition. For ten years he taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Matthew Wilson (’22), who just graduated from Middlebury with a degree in English & American Literatures, grew up in East Burke, Vermont, where he attended Burke Mountain Academy as an elite Alpine ski racer. His work to date is grounded in place and person, weaving together the physical and psychological experience of growing up in the Northeast Kingdom. In the future, he intends to apply to MFA programs where he will develop a keener sense of language and expand his writer’s mind.  

Suzanne Wise (’87) is the author of four collections of poetry and prose. Her books of poetry include The Book of Space (Tammy) and The Kingdom of the Subjunctive (Alice James Books). Her poetry has also been published in dozens of journals—including Bennington Review, Boston Review, Bomb, Green Mountains Review, Ploughshares, and Tikkun—andshe has been awarded writing residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her other writing includes news, reviews, and essays about art, poetry, and culture. She is currently at work on a graphic memoir and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Alicia Wright (’11.5), originally from Georgia, received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in English & Literary Arts: Creative Writing. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Paris Review, Ecotone, Third Coast, jubilat, and others. An NER intern in 2011, she served as the 2020–2021 Denver Quarterly Editorial Fellow and works currently as its Managing Editor; she is also the editor of Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. 

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