New England Review

News & Notes | NER in Best American Poetry 2011

Editor Kevin Young selected the following poems from NER for The Best American Poetry 2011:

Jennifer Grotz, “Poppies” (31.1); Eric Pankey, “Cogitatio Mortis” (also 31.1); and Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (30.4).

Best American Short Stories 2011 noted fiction from NER among its “distinguished stories” of the year:

Kirstin Allio, “Green” (31.3); Thomas Gough, “The Evening’s Peace” (30.4), Beth Lordan, “A Useful Story” (31.1); Christine Sneed, “Interview with the Second Wife” (31.4).

Best American Travel Writing 2011 cited Eric Calderwood’s “The Road to Damascus” (31.3) in its “Notable Travel Writing of 2010.”

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An excerpt from Trethewey’s poem “Elegy“:

I think by now the river must be thick
with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

as it was that morning: drizzle needling
the surface, mist at the banks like a net

settling around us—everything damp
and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
into the current and found our places—

you upstream a few yards, and out
far deeper. You must remember how

the river seeped in over your boots,
and you grew heavy with that defeat.

NER Recommends | Jesmyn Ward Interview

Jesmyn Ward’s brilliantly compelling novel Salvage the Bones won The National Book Award in Fiction last week. In this interview at The Paris Review Daily, she talks about facets of her book including Hurricane Katrina, the enduring influence of William Faulkner, the role of Greek myths in the story, and the political space of the novel as an art form:

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother’s flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.

A forthcoming memoir will chart new territory in the “life’s work” that the writer described in her acceptance speech.

NER Classics | Joint Custody by Elizabeth Rollins

Elizabeth Rollins’ essay “Joint Custody” first appeared in issue 26.2 (2005) and received special mention in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology:

 In the beginning, I had a small brown pleather suitcase. It had red and blue racing stripes on the side. When I came home to my mother’s, after two weeks at my father’s, my dog would climb into it, with my clothes, and fall immediately asleep, as if he was the one returning.

Eventually, the zipper on that suitcase broke. I used it anyway, carrying it with two arms, one to hold the flap shut. Things fell out in the car on the way to or from one of their houses. I was always dropping things. They got annoyed.

Then I had a plastic KLM bag from our trip to Europe with Mom. They gave it to us on the Dutch airplane, for things we might bring home from the trip. It was a cheap, bright blue with white lettering. It was only a square gym bag, not meant for heavy use. It didn’t last long.

After that, I used garbage bags. At my mother’s house they were the cheap white kind that sagged and tore easily. My father had sturdy black ones, so I tried to stash a couple each time I was at his house. With trash bags, you just tossed everything in each time. Lotion, clothes, books, Raggedy Ann, shoes, towel, toothbrush, shampoo.

When I departed for college, where I would live in the same room for a year, my father and stepmother bought me a set of luggage. There was even a garment bag, with little gold hooks for hangers at the top of it.

 These are some of the stories that I know. Other stories than the ones I usually tell. The first stories, I guess.

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