New England Review

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February 2021

New Books by NER Authors

February 28, 2021

February has been a fantastic publication month for NER authors. Charles Lamar Phillips’s historical noir novel, Estranged (Random House Publishing) follows a controversial city editor as he grapples with mid-century journalism; the historical post-war battles between the Mob and trade unions serve as the backdrop. Chapter 16 of Estranged formed the basis of the piece, “Prairie Symposium” that appeared in NER 32.2! Check out more from Charles Phillips at www.charleslamarphillips.com.

Former NER poetry editor and contributor, C. Dale Young recently published a poetry collection, Prometeo (Four Way Books). Prometeo was featured in Lambda Literary’s February’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books List, the Millions’ “Must Read Poetry: February 2021”, and Library Journal’s “Books and Authors To Know: Poetry Titles To Watch 2021.” Alex Dimitrov, published in NER 36.3 has also released a poetry collection, Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon) – his third book!

Other new books this month include Maria Stepanova’s “multi-faceted essay,” In Memory of Memory (New Directions) , translated by poet Sasha Dugdale. Dugdale was published in NER 41.2. February brought a new book by Paisley Rekdal, Appropriate: A Provocation (W.W. Norton and Company) that “presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature” — cultural appropriation.

You can shop these February titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Winter 2021 Bookshop page.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Alex Dimitrov, C. Dale Young, Charles Phillips, Maria Stepanova, Paisley Rekdal, Sasha Dugdale

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

C. Dale Young on Brigit Pegeen Kelly

September 4, 2018

NER 23.2 (2002)

Former Poetry Editor C. Dale Young recalls first reading “The Dragon” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, published in NER 23.2 (2002), reprinted in 35.3 (2014).

Having moved to San Francisco to complete my residency at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, I spent day after day caring for patients with cancer and very little time reading or writing poetry. This was to be a glimpse of the life I had ahead of me. In those early years in San Francisco, my only connection to poetry were the poems I considered for the pages of NER. On the most ordinary of Thursday evenings, I rode the N-Judah home from the hospital, stopped in the lobby of my apartment building, and opened my mailbox. Inside was a letter with the return address of B. Kelly. I knew it was not a regular letter to me because below my name was “Poetry Editor, New England Review.” I opened the envelope and found “The Dragon.” It was accompanied by a two-sentence letter: “You see, I have not forgotten you. I hope you can use this.” I read the poem immediately. I stood in the lobby and read the poem several times. To say I was mesmerized would be an understatement. And I am fully aware of the full meaning of that word. Standing there, reading this poem shocked me. It snapped me out of the daily repetitiveness of my life then. I marched myself up the stairs and stood in my living room and read it again, still standing. I sat down only to compose a note to thank Brigit and to write up a sheet to forward it to the magazine’s offices in Middlebury.

Brigit was a slow and methodical poet. It was rare to receive poems for consideration from her. I have never forgotten this poem. And even now, when I feel disconnected from poetry, when I feel I am slipping away from it, I read this poem. It has become a kind of lifeline for me. I am sure I will carry it with me to the grave.

 

“The Dragon” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

BUY the BACK ISSUE (23.2 or 35.3)

**

C. Dale Young served as Poetry Consultant, Associate Editor, and then Poetry Editor of New England Review from 1995 to 2014. He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four collections of poetry—The Day Underneath the Day (2001), The Second Person (2007), Torn (2011), and The Halo (2016)—and a work of fiction, Affliction: A Novel in Stories (2018). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in San Francisco with the biologist and composer, Jacob Bertrand, his spouse.

 

 

Filed Under: 40th Anniversary: From the Vault, NER Classics, News & Notes Tagged With: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, C. Dale Young

New Books by NER Authors (July)

July 5, 2018

Over and over, the poems in Justin Bigos’s Mad River call on the Divine. But paying attention is also a kind of prayer, and Bigos’s poetry does just that by invoking the details of the world it asks us to inhabit. Whether in Texas, Pittsburgh, or Chicago, these poems shimmer.—C. Dale Young, author of The Halo 

“These are astonishing and unforgettable poems, poems of loneliness and mercy, of violence and grace. Justin Bigos has written here one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a very long time—monumental, memorial, and alive!” —Matt Hart, author of Radiant Action and Radiant Heart.

Justin Bigos is the author of a previous collection of poems, the chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO, 2014). His writing has appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Forklift Ohio, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The Best American Short Stories 2015. He cofounded and coedits the literary journal Waxwing and makes his home in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he teaches at Northern Arizona University. His poems “Three Rivers” and “Prayer After Refusing to Pray” appeared in NER 33.4. 

Mad River can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.


Rachel Hadas’s new translation of the Iphigenia plays carves out its own space among recent translations of Euripides. None of them are quite so vivid, so contemporary, or (above all) so full of poetic interest. For those serious readers of poetry, Hadas’s translation will also stand out as constantly intriguing, inventive, and various.—John Talbot, author of Rough Translation: Poems

From the publisher: Poet and translator Rachel Hadas highlights the lyricism, emotion, and sheer humanity of Euripides’s plays. Mordant humor is here; so are heartbreak and tenderness. Hadas offers an Iphigenia story that resonates with our own troubled times and demonstrates anew the genius of one of the world’s supreme dramatists.

Rachel Hadas is a professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark, and is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations, including Questions in the Vestibule (Northwestern, 2016) and Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry. She is the editor (with Peter Constantine, Edmund Keeley, and Karen Van Dyck) of the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. Her work, both poetry and nonfiction, has appeared in many issues of NER to list, most recently in 36.1.

The Iphigenia Plays can be purchased at your local bookstore or directly from the publisher.


Hayes addresses this marvelous series of 70 free-verse sonnets to his potential assassin: a nameless, faceless embodiment of America’s penchant for racially motivated violence. The poems are redolent of his signature rhythmic artistry and wordplay . . . Inventive as ever, Hayes confronts America’s myriad ills with unflinching candor, while leaving space for love, humor, and hope. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered—the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award; Wind in a Box; Hip Logic; and Muscular Music, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2014 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowshop. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Several of his sonnets from this collection were published in NER 39.1.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin can be found at your local bookstore or online.


Hummel . . . presents a polished, droll, and provocative art-world thriller . . . With a cast of strong and complicated female characters, headed by a determined, reckless, funny, and imperiled amateur sleuth, Hummel crafts a shrewd and suspenseful inquiry into womanhood and the dark side of the art market, punctuated by striking variations on identity, portraiture, and “still lives.”—Booklist

“In this taut take on noir, misogyny, and the art of responsible storytelling, Hummel (Motherland, 2014, etc.) balances the glitz and glam of the Los Angeles art world with the town tourists don’t often see, from peeling, postwar bungalows to skid row tent cities and suffering junkies . . . This is a whip-smart mystery and a moving meditation on the consumption of female bodies all rolled into one.” —Kirkus Reviews

Maria Hummel is the author of the poetry collection House and Fire, winner of the 2013 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and two novels: Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and Wilderness Run (St. Martin’s, 2003). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry, Narrative, the Sun, the New York Times, and the centenary anthology The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. A Stegner Fellow, she taught at Stanford for nine years. She lives in Vermont with her husband and two sons, and teaches at the University of Vermont. Her short story “No Others Before Me” appeared in NER 31.2.

Still Lives can be purchased at your local bookstore or online.


Lisa Lewis writes of complex women as friends, mothers, sisters, “cat ladies,” dog walkers, and lovers. She writes with an astute awareness of class dynamics, the earth’s peril as a result of our violence, and our violent America—past and present. —Denise Duhamel

From the publisher: In Taxonomy of the Missing, Lisa Lewis’s sixth collection of poetry, the past is present, finely-detailed and filtered, but never diminished by, the kind of tender regret that accrues only after decades of lived experience.

Lisa Lewis‘s previous books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series), Vivisect, Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize), and The Body Double. A chapbook titled Story Box was also published as winner of the Poetry West Chapbook Contest. Lewis’s poem “Dry Hollows” appeared in NER 36.4.

Taxonomy of the Missing can be purchased directly from the publisher.



The Bible of Dirty Jokes is a bawdy and absorbing read—a madcap mystery about family secrets, small time stand-up comedy and big-time crimes. Visit the back alleys of the Borscht Belt and the underworld beyond with Eileen Pollack, one of our finest, and funniest, writers.—
Claire Vaye Watkins

From the publisher: In The Bible of Dirty Jokes, Eileen Pollack (Breaking and Entering, A Perfect Life) brings to life the hilarious and moving history of Borscht Belt comedy, Catskills resorts, and the notorious Jewish mob, Murder Inc. In a novel that reads like a cross between The Sopranos and a Sarah Silverman special, Pollack bestows on American literature a protagonist for the ages, the wisecracking, starry-eyed, endlessly generous and forgiving Ketzel Weinrach.

Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction. In addition to The Bible of Dirty Jokes (Four Way Books 2018), Breaking and Entering (2012), she has published In The Mouth (2008), and is the recipient of various fellowships. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Best American series and elsewhere; she has been published by NER multiple times, most recently in 32.4. Pollack lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor, where she teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

The Bible of Dirty Jokes can be found at your local bookstore or online.


All the distinguishing characteristics we’ve come to associate with Elizabeth Spires’ poems—their shimmering clarity, verbal restraint, and self-interrogations—are enacted in this new work of meticulous surfaces and surprising depths… — Michael Waters, author of Celestial Joyride

From the publisher: In A Memory of the Future, Elizabeth Spires details the search for a core identity, meditating on the necessary divide between the social persona who navigates the world and the artist’s secret self. As the poems move from Zen reflections outward into the identifiable worlds of Manhattan and Maryland’s Eastern shore, houses, both real and imagined, become metaphorical extensions of the self and psyche.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of seven poetry collections, including Worldling and The Wave-Maker. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, among others. A professor at Goucher College, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry was featured in NER 35.1. 

A Memory of the Future can be purchased directly from the publisher.

 



C. Dale Young’s stories masterfully illuminate the moments in which regret and longing and grace powerfully collide—and transform the topography of a life. The Affliction is an exhilarating collection: I emerged deeply grateful for the existence of this book.—Laura van den Berg

From the publisher: Young writes of people who know what it is to be disappeared—desaparecidos—and of those who know what it is to have to hide. He renders the grueling, distorting effect of such disappearances on individuals and on those who know them in love or fear or wonder. The Affliction provides powerful testament to the notion of stories as resistance to loss. This is a book of necessary, clear-hearted affirmation in troubled times.

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016); The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018) is his first fiction collection. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Guernica, the Hopkins Review, Normal School, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares, as well as anthologies and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

The Affliction: A Novel in Stories can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: C. Dale Young, Eileen Pollack, Elizabeth Spires, Justin Bigos, Lisa Lewis, Maria Hummel, Rachel Hadas, Terrance Hayes

Join us in Tampa!

NER 40th anniversary reading

February 16, 2018

New England Review celebrates forty consecutive years of publishing new voices in poetry, fiction, and essays with a reading at the 2018 AWP Conference in Tampa, FL. The five featured authors have appeared in NER as early as 1978 and as recently as 2018!

Join us Friday, March 9 at 12 pm, in the Tampa Convention Center (Room 14, First Floor) and hear some of the authors who have distinguished and sustained NER through the past four decades.

Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels. She has been the recipient of the Kafka Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is Hurst Sr. Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work first appeared in NER 1.2 (1978), under the name Kathryn Ungerer, and as recently as NER 34.1.

Kate Lebo‘s essay “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in NER 35.2, was anthologized in Best American Essays 2015. Her essay “The Unsealed Ear” appeared a year later in 36.4. She’s the author of a cookbook Pie School, and currently at work on her first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Cate Marvin is a visiting professor at Colby College. Her most recent book of poems is Oracle (Norton, 2015). She has published her poetry frequently in NER , beginning in NER 19.2 (1998) and as recently as NER 36.1 (2016).

Hai-Dang Phan‘s debut collection of poems, Reenactments, will be published by Sarabande in spring 2019. He is a 2017 NEA Fellow in Literature and the author of the chapbook Small Wars. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry, in addition to NER, most recently in 38.2. He was the 2016 winner of the NER/Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Emerging Writers Award.

C. Dale Young is author of The Affliction, a novel-in-stories, and four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Halo. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, he practices medicine full-time. He first published his poetry in NER 17.3 (1995), and then served as poetry editor for nearly 20 years. A new poem will appear in NER 39.1.

 

Filed Under: Events, News & Notes Tagged With: C. Dale Young, Cate Marvin, Hai-Dang Phan, Kate Lebo, Kathryn Davis

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Vol. 43, No. 2

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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