New England Review

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
    • Vol. 41 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 3 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 2 (2020)
      • Black Lives Matter
      • Vol. 41, No.1 (2020)
    • Vol. 40 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 4 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 3 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 2 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No 1 (2019)
    • Vol. 39 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 4 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 3 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 1 (2018)
    • Vol. 38 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017)
      • Vol.38, No. 2 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017)
    • Vol. 37 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 3 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016)
    • Vol. 36 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 4 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 3 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 2 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 1 (2015)
    • Vol. 35 (2014-2015)
      • Vol. 35, No.1 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015)
    • Vol. 34 (2013-2014)
      • Vol. 34, No. 1 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)
    • Vol. 33 (2012-2013)
      • Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 4 (2013)
    • Vol. 32 (2011-2012)
      • Vol. 32, No. 1 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012)
    • Vol. 31 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 2 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010-2011)
    • Vol. 30 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009-2010)
    • Vol. 29 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008)
    • Vol. 28 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 1 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 4 (2007)
    • Vol. 27 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 4 (2006)
    • Vol. 26 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 2 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 4 (2005)
    • Vol. 25 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 3 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 4 (2004)
    • Vol. 24 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 2 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 4 (2004)
  • About
    • Masthead
    • NER Award Winners
    • Press
    • Award for Emerging Writers
    • Readers and Interns
    • Books by our authors
    • Contact
  • Audio
  • Events
  • Submit

New Books from NER Authors: September 2017

September 30, 2017

Wesley Rothman’s pulsating debut Subwoofer is a collection of the needful songs we sing for each other. The poems are full of gorgeous and introspective exclamations made out of protest, out of rhymes, out of metronomes, oceans, and love. Each poem crackles with its own unexpected rhythms and the sum of all these exquisite sounds is a thoughtful exploration of spirituality and wonder.   —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

From the publisher: Subwoofer makes audible the deep bass of history, for this is a book of vibrant, honest listening: to the voices of Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Basquiat; to those without names; to the sadness of loss and the bitter silences within privilege and racism; to the luck of being alive. This book of witness, elegy, and renewal makes a noise that is joyful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.

Wesley Rothman’s work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Golden Shovel Anthology, among others. Recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, Rothman teaches in Washington, DC, while pursuing a doctorate in literature.

Subwoofer can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

℘

Vicious and haunting, luminescent and big-hearted, Alex McElroy’s writing burrows its way to the deep tissue of feeling and lodges there, determined. A gripping and nervy dissection of familial ties and the ambivalent bonds that structure our reality, Daddy Issues will leave you undone.
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

From the publisher: There are oil slicks in a patrilineal line—spaces in which paternal securities and filial affections lurch and loosen. So how does a daddy make do? In Alex McElroy’s collection Daddy Issues, daddies mourn their children; daddies absent themselves from their children; daddies take the shapes of celebrities to steal away the disguised wives of their children. Sometimes, daddies burn in a barn. Through an accumulation of gears, string, and brute pectoral muscle, McElroy brings these daddies back to life that we may see them as they are, in all their splendor and flop.

Alex McElroy’s writing appears in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and New England Review. He is the recipient of the 2016 Neutrino Prize from Passages North. His essay Endure was recently featured in NER 37.4 (Hear it read at NER Out Loud by Steven Medina.)

Daddy Issues can be purchased directly from its publisher The Cupboard.

℘

Weil showcases his narrative abilities in these offbeat and spirited stories . . .Weil’s stories have the scope and detours of longer work, and often seem to move on their own, following the protagonists’ unpredictable lives. The breadth of subject matter and styles is impressive, defying easy categorization and making the stories all the more memorable.―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Following his debut Dayton Literary Peace Prize-winning novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history. Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.

Josh Weil is the author of The Great Glass Sea and The New Valley. A Fulbright Fellow and National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, he has been awarded The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a Pushcart. His essay “Liberation Square” appeared in NER 27.2.

The Age of Perpetual Light is published by Grove Press and can be found online.

℘

This Blessed Earth is a sort of universal story of family farmers and all they’re up against in their efforts to take care of the land and make a living from it. It’s also a crash course in the history that brought us to this place of corporate power, shrinking resources, and a changing climate. But it plants seeds of hope as the next generation prepares to inherit the family land and all the joys and challenges that come with it.—Willie Nelson, founder and president of Farm Aid

From the publisher: For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

Ted Genoways is an acclaimed journalist and author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. A contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard, he is the winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and is a two-time James Beard Foundation Award finalist. His work has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 33.4.

This Blessed Earth can be purchased directly from its publisher Norton.

℘

Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language―especially where gender is concerned―to more fully capture the experience of a self “unlimited in its possibilities.” The setting of her third collection is woodsy, nocturnal, and by turns sinister and merciful; where “it did get dark” enough to see the stars “but how bright it was.” A range of characters compose a makeshift cast―or family―fluid enough to include a hermit, a cowboy, and a dowager. These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization.
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work by a space-age balladeer.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two previous collections. Her poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 36.3.

Rocket Fantastic can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

℘

The body becomes more than mystical in [Calling a Wolf a Wolf], as the boundaries between flesh and world are not merely blurred, but shattered—bodies are thrown upon all the sharp crooked edges of life and Akbar diligently records every detail of the aftermath. . . —Frontier Poetry

From the publisher: This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in the New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida. His poem “No Is A Complete Sentence” was recently published in NER 37.4.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf can be purchased online directly from its publisher Alice James.

 ℘

Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans.―Jamaal May

From the publisher: Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and “the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.”

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poem “Exiliados” was recently published in NER 38.1 .

Unaccompanied can be purchased online from its publisher, Copper Canyon Press.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: Alex McElroy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Javier Zamora, Josh Weil, Kaveh Akbar, Ted Genoways, Wesley Rothman

Join Us for the Third Annual "NER Out Loud"

February 24, 8 pm, Middlebury Dance Theatre

February 14, 2017

In partnership with the Mahaney Center for the Arts and Oratory Now, NER is pleased to present the third annual “NER Out Loud” event. Six Middlebury students from Oratory Now will read selected prose and poetry published in NER in 2016. After the show, join us for the “S’More Readings” reception, an opportunity to hear student readers present their original work, collect copies of student publications, and enjoy s’mores and other gourmet treats.

The “Out Loud” readers include Ellen Colton ’19 (reading Alison Stagner’s “Midnight”), Josh Espy ’17 (reading Maciej Milkowski’s “The Week of German Cinema”), Jabari Matthew ’17 (reading Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “Still Life…”), Steven Medina ’17 (reading Alex McElroy’s “Endure”), Melanie Rivera ’19 (reading Alia Volz’s “Chasing Arrows”), and Nia Robinson ’19 (reading Franny Choi’s “The Price of Rain”). Student publications Blackbird, Frame, Middlebury Geographic, and Translingual will be featured at the “S’More Readings” reception.

Please join us on Friday, February 24, at 8 PM in the Dance Theatre in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts. The reception will take place directly outside the theater immediately following the main performance. Admission is free, and all are welcome!

Filed Under: Audio, Events, NER Out Loud Tagged With: Alex McElroy, Alia Volz, Alison Stagner, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Franny Choi, Maciej Miłkowski

New England Review Award for Emerging Writers

Finalists announced for 2017

February 2, 2017

New England Review announces, with enormous pleasure, the finalists for the third annual New England Review Emerging Writers Award.

DSC_3006Please join us in congratulating our six finalists for 2017:

Alex McElroy (37.4)
Amy Meng
(37.4)
Kate Petersen
(37.2)
Genevieve Plunkett
(37.4)
Christine Robbins
(37.1)
Alan Rossi
(37.4)

The winner, to be announced later this month, will receive a scholarship to the 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Congratulations to them all—we are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in all three genres.

Filed Under: NER Community, News & Notes Tagged With: Alan Rossi, Alex McElroy, Amy Meng, Bread Loaf Emerging Writer's Award, Christine Robbins, Genevieve Plunkett, Kate Petersen

Alex McElroy

NER Digital

February 16, 2016

Try Going Home Unchanged by This Painting

TitiansCrowning_1Ivan taught me how to look at paintings. We met in line at the Louvre. It was my final day in Paris, my final city, concluding thirty days traveling alone. When the man who turned out to be Ivan touched my shoulder I softened, relieved by an unthreatening hand, expecting to turn and find someone I knew. But there was Ivan, a stranger, chubby and balding, his olive shirt unbuttoned to the fur on his chest. “I need to get in front of you,” he said, his English knotted by a Romanian accent. “I have someone important to see.”

I let him cut. The people before me did not. Ivan and I spoke to each other, hasty and vacant at first, until he asked what I had come to the museum to see. Titian. “Give me,” he said, meaning my map. He penned a route right to the Salle des Etats, the room Titian shared with that “most overrated attraction,” the Mona Lisa. He advised me to give it a glance—only a glance. Then he flashed a card at the ticket window and dashed into a crowd of flashbulbs and faces.

A motley, silent congestion dammed the entrance of the Salle des Etats. Inside, the Mona Lisa hung on an island, roped off and defended by gray-eyed guards cleaning their nails and shaming photographers. I advanced to the back of the room, to Titian’s The Entombment of Christ, where I stood for thirty-five minutes, my arms dutifully crossed.

I had spent the last month in museums, in front of Velásquez, Bosch, Goya, Vermeer, in a state of awe and confusion, but I could not say that I learned more than how to be silent, awaiting aesthetic vibrations. I was twenty-two, working through a thousand dollars of savings, tracing some nebulous path toward becoming an artist. The day I left, my mother wrote and advised me to not be shy. Her message startled me. We were never that close and reading her message I felt humiliated, exposed. Abroad, I did not heed her warnings. And now, near the end of my trip, I saw my shyness as an uncorrectable artistic flaw. How could I create if I could not even talk?

As I stood before The Entombment, a French voice sliced through the reverent hush. Across the room, Ivan discussed Tintoretto with a man in a suit. He led the man into an adjacent room but abandoned him and returned to me, already complaining about the idiocy of his client. “I am the best,” he said, “but sometimes they cannot see, whatever I do, they just cannot see.” Ivan spoke with the confident, knowing rapport of a sibling. His tone comforted me. This was the closest to intimacy I had gotten in months.

“Museum directors pay me to show them their museums,” he boasted. “The director at the Met never knew how to look at her paintings.” He pointed at The Entombment. “Do you see this?” He hovered his finger over Christ’s knee and slid it up to the corner, then the same to Christ’s arm, exposing the obvious parallel. “No, no,” he said, interrupting himself, and dragged me to Tintoretto’s The Coronation of the Virgin, which we studied for two prompt minutes before returning to The Entombment. “Now do you see?” Ivan asked. Color flooded the painting. How had I missed it? The blue glimmer of Mary’s shawl bridged to Nicodemus’s orange tunic by the bone-colored shroud carrying Christ.

Ivan believed one only saw art by returning to art, refreshing the eyes. Docents, historians, the quacks who stood stiff as boards, they tried to gaze their way into paintings, thinking the work might reveal itself with the extra-dimensional flare of a stereogram. He chattered before the paintings, distracting me, guiding my eyes away from the canvas so that I could view it anew. Finally, he led me to “Titian’s finest,” The Crowning with Thorns. The color astounded me. In the painting, Christ stands weak-legged on darkened stone steps, four men binding the crown of thorns to his head. Christ wears a robe cherry in color; the others in golds, sumptuous greens, chainmail armor so finely depicted it practically chings.

“Devastating,” said Ivan. Great art, he proposed, devastates. It destroys the world you thought you knew. “Titian devastates,” he said. He pointed over his shoulder, toward the crowd leaning against a rope, squinting at the Mona Lisa. “That you can look at and return to your life. But try,” he pleaded, “try going home unchanged by this painting.”

We must have stood there for two hours, our voices increasingly animated. Soon there was no one to bother but guards. Ivan gave me his card. He lived in San Francisco—a modest drive from Oregon, where I lived—and suggested I visit for an upcoming Van Gogh exhibit. I promised I would. Ivan departed abruptly.

Back in Oregon, my story of Ivan was met with unflinching cynicism. He was a kook, I was told. An aging romantic. A scam artist. I Googled his name and learned that he typically charged three hundred dollars an hour to lead someone through a museum. For some time, this hurt me. I felt exploited, manipulated. But let’s say Ivan had wanted nothing but money. So what? With him, I learned how to let art manipulate me. If Ivan preyed on my lonely, vulnerable nature, he did what any great work must do. To be affected by art requires we enter the work vulnerable, pliable, ready to let it absorb and change who we are.

This, I think, is what Ivan meant by devastation. The work alone doesn’t devastate. We must approach the work ready to be devastated, the way I finally did that evening in Paris, a young man fragile and quiet, awaiting a hand on my shoulder.

♦♦♦

Alex McElroy’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, the Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, and Music & Literature. More work can be found at alexmcelroy.org. He currently lives in Bulgaria.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital Tagged With: Alex McElroy, Titian "The Crowning with Thorns"

Vol. 42, No. 1

Subscribe

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.

ner via email

Stories, poems, essays, and web features delivered to your Inbox.

quarterly newsletter

Click here to sign up for quarterly updates.

categories

Navigation

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
  • About
  • Events
  • Audio
  • NER Out Loud
  • Emerging Writers Award
  • Support NER
  • Advertising
  • The Podcast

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Categories

Copyright © 2021 · facebook · twitter