New England Review

New Books from NER Authors

“[Allison Benis White’s] delicate and elegant furor scribendi reads like a lucid dream in which mortality—the wonder of it, as well as it attendant terrors—is made palpable. . . . This book haunts.”—Amy Newman

From Publishers Weekly (starred review): “White meditates on mental health in this spellbinding collection, a lamentation dedicated to four women she knew ‘who took their lives within a year.’ Her primary investigations concern the liminality and ever-imperfect definitions of feeling, the duality of emotions, and language’s role as a medicine and a mirror. She draws inspiration from numerous women writers—including Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—and borrows text from family members’ writings during the Holocaust.”

Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books, 2017) and Small Porcelain Head (Four Way Books, 2013), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Allison is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Please Bury Me in This can be purchased from Four Way Books and other booksellers.

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“In this stunningly lyrical debut, Johnson probes issues of queer culture and love from an array of existential perspectives, creating a melodic and thought-provoking symphony on queer identity. . . . [A] miniature opus, alternately joyful and heartrending, achingly bittersweet.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the publisher: Sinuous and sensual, the poems of In Full Velvet interrogate the nuances of desire, love, gender, ecology, LGBTQ lineage and community, and the tension between a body’s material limits and the forms made possible by the imagination. Characterized by formal poise, vulnerability, and compassion, Johnson’s debut collection is one of resounding generosity and grace.

Jenny Johnson is a recipient of the 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, and the 2016 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In Full Velvet can be purchased from Sarabande Books and other booksellers.

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“Cortney Lamar Charleston’s poems testify in the eternal court of history.”—D. A. Powell

From the publisher: Cortney Lamar Charleston’s debut collection looks unflinchingly at the state of race in 21st Century America. Today, as much as ever before, the black body is the battleground on which war is being waged in our inner cities, and Charleston bears witness with fear, anger, and glimpses of hope. He watches the injustice on TV, experiences it firsthand at simple traffic stops, and even gives voice to those like Eric Garner and Sandra Bland who no longer can. Telepathologies is a shout in the darkness, a plea for sanity in an age of insanity, and an urgent call to action.

Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D. A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has earned fellowships from Cave Canem and The Conversation Literary Festival. His poems have appeared in  Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Journal, Pleiades, River Styx and more. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Telepathologies can be purchased from SPD Books and other booksellers.

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“Heighton is as attuned to the micro-politics of the village as to the macro-politics of Europe and the Middle East . . . His focus is sometimes hermetic, sometimes global, and he balances violent passages with lyrical descriptions of intimacy . . .  For Heighton, there is no place that’s removed from history; there are only people who dream of living in such places.” —The Walrus

From the publisher: From internationally acclaimed and Governor General’s Award-winning author Steven Heighton comes a passionate novel of buried secrets, the repercussions of war, and love among the ruins. To make his dying ex-cop father happy, Elias Trifannis joins the military. In Afghanistan, he realizes his last-minute bid for connection was a terrible mistake—but it’s too late. Elias is sent to Cyprus to recover from a tragedy but just when it seems he has found sanctuary, events he himself set in motion have already begun to endanger it.

Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and is currently in pre-production for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. Heighton’s most recent book of poetry, The Waking Comes Late, won the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry; his works have been nominated for numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W. H. Smith Award.

The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep can be purchased from Penguin Random House and other booksellers.

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From the publisher: KGB Chief Yuri Andropov himself has tapped Senior Detective Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso’s wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, dredging up long-forgotten histories from the Civil War, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead. Yet Matyushkin—as relentless and gut-driven as ever—won’t be stopped, even if it means taking on his partner, the KGB, and a ghost from decades past.

In this third installment in the Matyushkin Case Files, Bayer is in top form, painting a vivid picture not just of life in 1960s Moscow, but of connected events half a century before, when the Soviet regime was being twisted and shaped by war and revolution.

Alexei Bayer is a New York-based author, translator and, by economic necessity, an economist. He writes in English and in Russian, his native tongue, and translates into both languages. His short stories have been published in New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Chtenia. Murder and the Muse is his third novel.

Murder and the Muse can be purchased from Russian Life and other booksellers.

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“Beautifully intricate, contentious, strikingly ardent poems by one of our great contemporary poets.” –Joyce Carol Oates

From the publisher: Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet’s task: to record with candor and ardor “the burden of being alive.” In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind’s encounter with the brute fact of the body’s decay, the spirit’s erasure. 

C. K. Williams (1936–2015) was most recently published in NER 36.1. Falling Ill: Last Poems is Williams’s last book. Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly “the dreadful edge of a precipice” where a futureless future stares back. Urgent, unpunctuated, headlong, vertiginous, they race against time to trace the sinuous, startling twists and turns of consciousness. All is coming apart, taken away, except the brilliant art to describe it as the end is coming. All along is the reassurance of love’s close presence.

Williams published twenty-two books of poetry, including Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award.

Falling Ill can be purchased from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and other booksellers.

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“Thi Bui’s stark, compelling memoir is about an ordinary family, but her story delivers the painful truth that most Vietnamese of the 20th century know in an utterly personal fashion—that history is found in the marrow of one’s bones, ready to be passed on through blood, through generations, through feelings.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist

From the publisher: This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.

In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States as a child. She studied art and law and thought about becoming a civil rights lawyer, but became a public school teacher instead. Bui lives in Berkeley, California, with her son, her husband, and her mother. The Best We Could Do is her debut graphic novel.

The Best We Could Do can be purchased from Abrams Books and other booksellers.

Allison Benis White

Behind the Byline

NER poet Allison Benis White talks to  poetry editor Rick Barot about the grief she reveals in the poems “Waldgeist,” “Sheathe,” and “Ignis Fatuus,” and how the power of language helps her think and feel most profoundly as she turns private grief into public art.

RB: You have three achingly beautiful poems in the current issue of the magazine—“Waldgeist,” “Sheathe,” “Ignis Fatuus”—and they seem to be part of a larger project. Can you talk about the story behind these poems?

ABW: Yes, these poems are part of a larger project called “The Wendys,” which is currently a manuscript with five sections, each devoted to a different Wendy (Wendy Torrance from The Shining; Wendy O. Williams, lead singer of the Plasmatics; Wendy Coffield, the first located victim of the Green River Killer in Kent, Washington; Wendy Darling; and contemporary photographer Wendy Given). The looming, private “Wendy” in this manuscript is my mother, Wendy (who disappeared when I was a baby and returned, suddenly, many years later), originally named Trudy, who renamed herself Wendy as a child after reading Peter Pan. The three poems in NER are from the section that meditates on a series of photographs by Wendy Given—and their titles are the titles of her photographs.

This whole manuscript is an exploration of grief, loss, and violence (against and by women)—and this section helped me articulate the way the living speaker wrestles with a particular death via natural images. Also, these poems represent my first attempts at lineation in a very long time—I’ve been writing prose poems for years and I almost forgot about the incredible flexibility, musicality, and power of line breaks.

RB: You’ve just published your third book of poems, Please Bury Me in This.  I’ve just read it, and I found it devastating. It’s clear that the book is one of grief and mourning, but the poems are also quite elliptical. Can you talk about how you handled the poems’ dynamic between the privacy of grief and the public nature of art?

ABW: I struggle, as I’m sure we all do, with this dynamic. Initially, I handled it by not showing anyone (bar one dear reader, periodically) the poems from Please Bury Me in This while I was writing them—this way, I felt the poems were almost wholly mine, wholly sealed. And yet I was careful while I was writing them to avoid certain biographical details—which reveals the consciousness of the eventual public space and my desire to protect myself (and others).

The dedications I added once the book was complete (“for the four women I knew who took their lives within a year,” and “for my father”) work to make public the book’s originating traumas. And the book’s epigraph from the New York Times (“Mental illness is not a communicable disease, but there is a strong body of evidence that suicide is still contagious”) works to further offer a public declaration of the speaker’s conflict: the contagion she witnessed, and suffers from.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I wanted to balance the elliptical nature of the poems by revealing my biographical losses up front. I also want to say that the way I grieve and think and feel most profoundly is through language—and my ability to articulate is often accessed in the tension between the utterly private space of writing and the belief/hope that a stranger, in the future, might experience and commune with these sentences, with this (my/her) life and mind.

RB: Since much of your recent work delves into grief, who are the poets or books of poems that have been models or tutelary spirits for you?

My first loves and teachers (about grief and language) were Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, Killarney Clary’s Who Whispered Near Me, Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I know you asked me about tutelary poets or books of poems, and I realize many of these books are written in prose, but I house them in one category.

RB: In general, who are the writers, artists, musicians on your list of recommendations these days?

Recently, I’ve been evangelical about recommending Peter Orner’s latest book of criticism (that stumbles into a memoir), Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live. It’s extraordinary, and currently a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. If it doesn’t win, I’m going to riot (i.e., eat an entire package of Nutter Butters).

In the last few months, I’ve also read and highly recommended Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green.

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Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books, 2017), Small Porcelain Head (Four Way Books, 2013), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry, and Self-Portrait with Crayon (CSU Poetry Center, 2009). She teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

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