New England Review

New Books by NER Authors

“No one writes with a more acute attention to the immediate world than David Baker, but his relish of particulars is always subject to a broader meditation that looks behind and ahead… David Baker is one of our finest poets.” — Rodney Jones, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Elegy for the Southern Drawl and Village Prodigies

From the publisher: A sweeping poetic achievement, Swift represents David Baker’s evolution as one of American poetry’s most significant voices.

Gathering poems from eight collections—including the widely acclaimed Changeable Thunder (2001) and his masterful latest, Scavenger Loop (2015)—and adding three suites of new poems, David Baker proves himself once again “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker). With equal curiosity and candor, he explores the many worlds we all inhabit—from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighborhoods, villages, and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share.

David Baker’s last collection was Never-Ending Birds, which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His many honors include fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, and is the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Poetry and Professor of English at Denison University. His work appeared most recently in NER 37.1 and is forthcoming this summer.

Swift can be found at your local independent bookstore or online.

“Expertly orchestrated and engaging… Of the novels to come out of the #MeToo moment to date, none is more riveting, insightful, and unsettling.” — Kirkus (starred review)

From the publisher: An atmospheric and unsettling drama from a novelist acclaimed as “the literary descendent of Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith” (Boston Globe), Afternoon of a Faun combines a sharply observed study of our shifting social mores with a meditation on what makes us believe, or disbelieve, the stories people tell about themselves.

James Lasdun is the author of The Fall Guy, The Horned Man, and Seven Lies, several poetry and short story collections, and a memoir. He teaches at the New York State Writers Institute and lives in upstate New York. His writing appeared in NER 30.3.

Afternoon of a Faun can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

“These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don’t merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters―loss, desire, rage, becoming―and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense.” ―U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

From the publisher: Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s daring new poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of a body, where living things grow and wither―or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its most innovative… Jericho Brown is a poet of eros: here he wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, and several of The Best American Poetry anthologies. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), won the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award. He serves as poetry editor for The Believer. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta. His poems are featured in NER 28.1 (2007) and NER 35.3 (2014).

The Tradition can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

“The poems weave recorded language from actors and soldiers with descriptions of the ‘games’ collected over Stone’s two-year anthropological study at Pineland…. Pineland’s setting allows the poet to explore the morality of war from a perspective that is analytical and viscerally haunting.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone’s two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at “Pineland,” a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine—alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart.

Nomi Stone is a poet, anthropologist, and author of a previous book of poems, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008). Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently in POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Stone has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, an MPhil in Middle East Studies from Oxford, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches at Princeton University and her ethnography in progress, Human Technology and American War, is a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier Series. Read her poem “Wonder Days,” originally published in NER 38.4.

Order Kill Class from the publisher here, or at your local independent book store.

“An older man, a younger woman, show biz, nakedness—but wait! This is the hilarious version with characters so sympathetic you root for them all, even the guy.” – Patricia Marx, New Yorker humorist and author of Him Her Him Again the End of Him

From the publisher: An incredibly timely, terrifically witty and moving debut about a young writers’ assistant on a late night comedy show and what transpires when she accepts an invitation from its enigmatic host to spend a long weekend at his mansion in Connecticut.
At once hilarious and poignant, brilliantly incisive and terrifically propulsive, Stay Up with Hugo Best is an incredibly timely exploration of sexual politics in the #MeToo age, and the unforgettable story of one young woman’s poignant stumbling into adulthood.

Erin Somers’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House Open Bar, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, the Cincinnati Review, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and was a 2016 NYC Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2016 Millay Colony resident. She lives in Beacon, New York, with her husband and daughter, and was an NER fiction reader from 2015-2017.

Stay Up with Hugo Best can be ordered here from the publisher, or purchased at your local independent bookseller.

“Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” —Rosanna Warren, judge of the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

From the publisher: Owen McLeod’s extraordinary debut maps the contours of an ordinary life: the rise and fall of romantic love, the struggle against mental illness, and the unending quest for meaning and transcendence. Ranging from sonnets and sestinas to experimental forms, these poems are unified by their musicality, devotion to craft, and openness of heart.

Owen McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives. He has held visiting positions at Yale and Mt. Holyoke. His poems have been published in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New England Review, in NER 36.4.

Dream Kitchen can be ordered here from the publisher, or purchased at your local independent bookstore.

New Books by NER Authors

9780393353471_300[The] language . . . feels almost ancient solely by the skill with which Baker uses it.—Los Angeles Review of Books

From W. W. Norton: In this masterful new work by “the most moving and expansive poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker), David Baker constructs a layered natural history of his beloved Midwest and traces the complex story of human habitation from family and village life to the evolving nature of work and the mysterious habitats of the heart.

David Baker’s last collection, Never-Ending Birds, was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His many honors include fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Baker, from Granville, Ohio, is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, and the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Poetry and Professor of English at Denison University. His work appeared in NER most recently in 37.1. Scavenger Loop can be purchased through W. W. Norton and from independent booksellers.

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Doty is able to weave philosophical inquiry, personal anecdote, and awe at people and nature into a voice that is simultaneously warm and tinged with a useful measure of doubt. — Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR9780393353228_300

From W. W. Norton: Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker aboveground: gardens and animals, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

Mark Doty is the author of eight previous books of poetry and four books of prose. His many honors include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, among others. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. His work appeared in NER most recently in 32.1. Deep Lane can be purchased through W. W. Norton and from independent booksellers.

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81um11zcnalA beautiful, profound novel about the families we are born into and the ones we create.—Tatjana Soli, New York Times bestselling author of The Lotus Eaters

From the publisher: All her life Vera has felt like a stranger in the old and drafty half-timbered farmhouse she arrived at as a five-year-old refugee from East Prussia in 1945, and yet she can’t seem to let it go. Sixty years later, her niece Anne suddenly shows up at her door with her small son. As the two strong-willed and very different women share the great old house, they find what they have never thought to search for: a family. Translated from the German by Anne Stokes, Dörte Hansen’s debut novel has become an international bestseller.

Anne Stokes’s most recent book-length translation of poetry by Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014), features over one hundred poems from Kirsch’s ten collections, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the Popescu European Translation Prizes in 2015. Stokes teaches German and Translation Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her translation of Sarah Kirsch’s Winter appears in NER 37.3. This House is Mine can be purchased through Macmillan and from independent booksellers.

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510ep3ipt4lIntimate and hypnotic . . . whether turning her gaze inward or outward, these poems question the moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical needs that poetry exists to fill. —Ploughshares

In her newest poetry collection, Dana Levin uses humor, jump-cut imagery, and popular culture references in preparation for the approaching apocalypse. Against a backdrop of Facebook, cat memes, and students searching their smartphones for a definition of the soul, Levin draws upon a culture of limited attention spans as it searches for greater spiritual meaning.

Dana Levin has published three books of poetry, Wedding Day, Sky Burial, and In the Surgical Theatre, which won the APR/Honickman Award in 1999. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence. Her work appeared in NER 34.2. Banana Palace can be purchased through Powell’s Books and independent booksellers.

Announcing NER 36.2


With its focus on China, NER 36.2 brings us up close to an old, new world of art and history, nature and poetry. Also in this issue, we traverse our own country from the Atlantic to the Pacific with authors as they remember collective pasts, brave their own presents, and escort the most foreign of foreigners from our halls of ivy to our backroads theaters. The new issue of NER has just shipped from the printer and a preview is available on our website. Order a print or digital copy today!

POETRY

Kazim Ali • David Baker • Christopher Bakken • Joshua Bennett • Bruce Bond • Luisa A. Igloria • Vandana Khanna • Rickey Laurentiis • Katrina Roberts • Ed Skoog • Xiao Kaiyu (translated by Christopher Lukpe) • Ya Shi (translated by Nick Admussen) • Yin Lichuan (translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain)


FICTION

Steve De Jarnatt • Joann Kobin • Carla Panciera • Sharon Solwitz • Michael X. Wang.


NONFICTION

• Wei An’s ruminations on nature just north of Beijing (translated by Thomas Moran)
• Wendy Willis on Ai Weiwei’s blockbuster show at Alcatraz
• Marianne Boruch discovers the diagnostic value of poetry
• Interpreter Eric Wilson relives the encounters of a Faeroese poet with American activists, academics, and alcohol
• James Naremore considers the considerable Orson Welles at 100, looking beyond Citizen Kane
• Jeff Staiger makes a case for how The Pale King was to have trumped Infinite Jest
• Camille T. Dungy is more than welcomed to Presque Isle as she finds herself in Maine’s early history
• “The Gloomy Dean” William Ralph Inge revisits Rome under the Caesars

Order a copy in print or digital formats for all devices.

 

New Books for May from NER Authors

 

“The most moving and expansive poet to come out of the American Midwest since 9780393246124_198James Wright.”

New England Review congratulates David Baker on the publication of his new book of poetry, Scavenger Loop (W. W. Norton & Company). Baker is an NER author with poetry forthcoming in NER 36.2.

Baker’s latest work layers the natural history of his beloved Midwest and traces the “complex history of human habitation, from family and village life to the evolving nature of work and the mysterious habitats of the heart.”

David Baker is the author of Never-Ending Birds and several other collections, and has won awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. He is editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University.

 Purchase this book at W.W. Norton & Company or at independent booksellers.

 

riverhouseCongratulations to NER contributor Sally Keith on the publication of her newest collection, River House (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which features poems of absence written after the loss of her mother. Keith is the author of The Fact of the Matter and two previous collections of poetry, Design and Dwelling Song. She is a faculty member of the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, DC. Keith’s poem “Song from the Rain” appeared in NER 24.4, and two  poems, “In the Desert Near . . .” and “What heavenward gesture . . . ” in NER 33.2. In addition, her essay “The Spirit of the Beehive” appeared as an original New England Review Digital piece in our ongoing series, Confluences.

“. . . when you’re finished reading, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again.  I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss.” —James Longenbach, author of The Iron Key

Purchase River House at Milkweed Editions or at independent booksellers. 

 

testament_bookstore“Waldrep offers us his most necessary book, one that asks us that question we fear ourselves to ask: how is this real, any of it, all of it, faith, language, light, history, and that cipher that collects them all, the human heart?” —Dan Beachy-Quick

We are pleased to announce the publication of G. C. Waldrep‘s latest work, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). From the publisher: A book-length poem, Testament addresses matters as diverse as Mormonism, cymatics, race, Dolly the cloned sheep, and his own life and faith. Drafted over twelve trance-like days while in residence at Hawthornden Castle, Waldrep . . . tackles the question of whether gender can be a lyric form. Intimately autobiographical, Waldrep’s fifth book masterly takes its own place in the American tradition of the long poem.

Waldrep’s most recent poems in New England Review include “What David Taught and Where He Taught It” (NER 34.3-4) and “Their Faces Shall Be As Flames” (NER 35.3). The recipient of multiple awards, Waldrep teaches at Bucknell University, is editor for the literary journal West Branch, and editor-at-large for Kenyon Review.

Purchase Testament at BOA Editions, Ltd. or at independent booksellers. 

 

Russian_Poetry“An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry.” — Penguin Classics

NER congratulates Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk on their new anthology The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (edited with poet Irina Mashinski, Penguin Classics, 2015). From the publisher: This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets—Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them—in captivating modern translations.

Chandler and Dralyuk’s translations and writings have appeared in the special section “The Russian Presence” of New England Review‘s double issue 34.3-4. Chandler is a poet and translator of many works of Russian literature and teaches part time at Queen Mary, University of London. Dralyuk is a lecturer in Russian at the University of St. Andrews and translator of many books from Russian.

Purchase The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry from Penguin Classics or an independent bookseller. 

  “A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.” —W. S. Merwin

 

9780224099837-1-edition.default.original-1We are pleased to announce the publication of NER contributor Mark Doty‘s newest collection of poems Deep Lane (Norton 2015). From Publisher’s Weekly: “Having gained renown for his self-consciously beautiful, heart-on-sleeve elegies, Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet.”

Mark Doty’s work appears in NER volumes 13.3-4, 31.2, and 32.1. He has published eight volumes of poetry, and his collection Fire to Fire won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Doty’s work has also received numerous honors including the National Book Critics Circle Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor and writer-in-residence at Rutgers University.

Purchase Deep Lane at W. W. Norton & Company or at independent booksellers.

 

New England Review congratulates contributor Lauren Acampora on her debut novel, The Wonder Garden (Grove, 2015). Acampora creates a portrait of a Connecticut suburb through a collection of linked stories that wonder garden coverPublisher’s Weekly calls “intelligent, unnerving, and very often strange.”

From the publisher: “A keen and brilliant observer of the strangeness that is American suburbia. Acampora joins the ranks of writers like John Cheever and Tom Perrotta in her incisive portrait of lives intersecting in one Connecticut town . . . Deliciously creepy and masterfully choreographed, The Wonder Garden heralds the arrival of a phenomenal new talent in American fiction.”

Lauren Acampora’s fiction has appeared in NER 27.3 as well as NER Digital, Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. 

Purchase The Wonder Garden from Grove Atlantic or at independent booksellers.

 

“A brace and necessary set of early flares of the literary imagination into the Panopticon we all find ourselves living inside these days.” — Jonathan Lethem

We are excited to announce the publication of Watchlist (OR Books 2015), a collection of short stories about surveillance society edited by NER contributor Bryan Hurt.

Hurt’s work appears in NER 33.2 as well as in American Reader, Kenyon Review, and Tin House, and many others. He has published a novel, Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, and is the winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.

Purchase Watchlist at OR Books or at independent booksellers.

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