” . . . a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay.”

We are pleased to announce the publication of NER contributor Michael Cohen‘s essay collection, A Place to Read: Life and Books (Interactive Press). The book includes an investigative essay published in NER 31.4 as well as The King in Winter, which appeared as an NER digital.

From Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review: “Michael Cohen’s essays on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader.”

“Each [piece] is in its own way a comment on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is both refined and erudite. Amusing, highly personal, insightful, they’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp . . .” —E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries

Since retiring from university teaching, Michael Cohen’s essays have appeared in Harvard Review, Birding, the Humanist, Missouri Review, and the Kenyon Review in addition to NER. He is also the author of five books, including a poetry text, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace, 1983) and an award winning book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Georgia, 1989).

 

“The poetic sensibility itself is characterized by restlessness–a ‘daring’ aspiration toward fuller meaning, feeling, and vision.”

Congratulations to NER contributor Carl Phillips on the publication of his collection of essays, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf). An excerpt of this book appears in NER 35.2. His reflection, “On Restlessness,” can be read in full online.

From Publishers Weekly: “Abundant autobiographical glimpses lend substance and specificity to Phillips’s tenet that ‘art and life are forever part of the same thing.’ Phillips analyzes individual poems by Shakespeare, Herbert, Shelley, Frost, Gunn, and others, along with his own work. The result is a slim volume memorable for delicate
insights . . . and for its grounding of theory in the life and personality of the poet.”

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest (2013), Double Shadow (2011), and Rest of Love (2004). He is the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

” . . . his poems, more than anyone else’s, take the shape of fire, all its ambiguity and wind-shreddedness, all its likeness to poppies in the wheat.” —H. K. Hix

Eric Pankey has published his tenth poetry collection, Dismantling the Angel (Parlor Press, 2014). Pankey has been appeared in several issues of NER, most recently in 34.1.

“In these precise, dream-like poems, Eric Pankey peers through the clarifying lens of metaphor and parable to meditate on mystery, human sympathy and the divine. Here, the shifting image of fire both articulates and consumes our sense of the vastness of history and the ineffable nature of divinity.”—Kevin Prufer

Pankey’s other publications include The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Trace. He is Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.

 

“Kasischke astonishes with her lyricism and metaphorical power as she considers illness and mortality through exacting, imaginative poems.”

Laura Kasischke’s newest collection of poetry, The Infinitesimals (Copper Canyon, 2014) is now out with strong reviews. Her work appears most recently in NER 34.2.

From Publisher’s Weekly: The brevity of Kasischke’s lines movingly captures the absence of death and the limitations on memory, and her mastery of meticulous, though seemingly effortless, description shines throughout, as when she dubs a cake once baked for her father as “Soggy church bell on a plate,” or describes a tumor as a “terrible frog/ Of moonlight and dampness on a log.”

Laura Kasischke has published nine novels and eight previous collections of poetry. For her collection, Space, in Chains, she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

 

“It’s the music, the beauty, after all, that’s balm to all this sorrow. The American reminds me of this.” —Ross Gay

Longtime NER contributor David Roderick has published his poetry collection, The Americans with the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has previously appeared in NER issues 24.2 and 32.1.

“The Americans is a compelling meditation on the ways we go about our lives at this cultural moment, often unmoored from the facts of history though we drift along its shores. Part complicated love letter to suburbia, these poems demand that we consider not only what we are drawn to but also what we fail to see, how the apocryphal feeds our cultural amnesia. The poet asks: ‘Must nostalgia / walk like a prince through all our rooms?’ This lovely collection shows us a way to confront that question within ourselves.” —Natasha Tretheway, U.S. Poet Laureate

David Roderick’s first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize. He is a recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and he currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

 

New York Times bestselling novelist Susan Vreeland is back with the publication of Lisette’s List. Her short story, “Love Burning,” was featured in NER 20.2.

Susan Vreeland is the author of four New York Times bestselling novels—The Passion of Artemisia, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Clara and Mr. Tiffany, and Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame television drama. Her books have been translated into 26 languages.

“Vreeland’s ability to make this complex historical novel as luminous as a Tiffany lamp is nothing less than remarkable.”—The Washington Post

“Vreeland’s writing is so graceful, her research so exhaustive, that a reader is enfolded in the world of Tiffany and Driscoll.”—Los Angeles Times