We’re closing out the year with seven fresh titles from some of our favorite indie publishers! Part 3 of our fall roundup includes boundary-breaking poetry, a hard-won memoir, and an essay collection that redefines self-discovery. Browse and shop these and other titles by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.
Removal Acts, the debut poetry collection by NEA fellow Erin Marie Lynch, is available everywhere courtesy of Graywolf Press. With bite and buoyancy, Lynch probes the interspaces of archive and lived experience as a descendant of the Dakota people. Poet and critic Janani Ambikapathy praised the scale of the collection and Lynch‘s ability to wield “punctuation marks—brackets, arrows, and spaces—like weapons.” Lynch’s poem “The Tanner’s Bride” appeared in issue 36.1.
In early October, Copper Canyon Press published The Fears, Kevin Prufer’s electrifying new poetry collection. Gothic yet grounded, The Fears stuns as it poses questions of mortality and value. In a review for Rhino Poetry, poet Susanna Lang celebrated the originality of Prufer’s voice, writing “he has found a form that mimics the way his own brain works.” Prufer has appeared in several issues of the New England Review, most recently in issue 42.2.
Robert Pack’s final collection of poetry, Searching for Home, was published posthumously by Slant Books. Meditating on themes of empathy, resilience, and aesthetics, Searching for Home centers around Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and the author’s own uncle to examine the distances we travel—physically and metaphorically—to find where we belong. Pack, retired faculty of Middlebury College and former director of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, appeared in several issues of New England Review, including issue 14.1.
New from Autumn House Press comes Julie Marie Wade’s Otherwise, an exhilarating essay collection written throughout her 20s. Award-winning novelist and poet Ander Monson referred to Wade as “one of our very best and most adventurous [writers],” lauding the essays in Otherwise for “their roving intelligence, their handling of fragments, their depth.” Two of Wade’s poems appeared in NER 37.3, including “Portrait of the Sister as Phantom Limb.”
Kevin Craft’s third poetry collection, Traverse, is hot off the press from Lynx House Press. Strikingly human and propelled by the nuances of familial relationships, Traverse prioritizes self-discovery in the wake of estrangement, parenthood, and grief through deftly approachable verse. Craft’s poems have appared in multiple issues of New England Review, most recently in volume 41.2.
Earlier this season, Acre Books released Dan O’Brien’s Survivor’s Notebook, a visceral collection of prose poems. In wielding the tools of memoir, O’Brien illuminates the traumas and triumphs of two cancer survivors to profound effect. This compliment to O’Brien’s 2021 collection Our Cancers (Acre Books) is as inspiring as it is skilled. An excerpt from Survivor’s Notebook appeared in NER 42.2.
At the end of October, Dalkey Archive Press published Dan O’Brien’s searing memoir From Scarsdale: A Childhood. Part family investigation, part liberating tale of artistic discovery, O’Brien’s From Scarsdale is a lyrical testament to what is survivable. Fans of O’Brien’s A Story That Happens (Dalkey Archive Press, 2021) and The House in Scarsdale (Bloomsbury, 2019) will enjoy the ache and hope of his latest work. New England Review published an excerpt from From Scarsdale in volume 40.2.
Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.