The good reads continue in Part 2 of our roundup of recent titles by NER authors! The list below features a variety of genres and aesthetics, including a modern imagining of a classical Chinese poetry tradition, a novel about a cult leader’s daughter, and an essay collection that investigates popular myths surrounding famous women. Shop all of these titles and more on Bookshop.org.
These Particular Women, a collection of essays by NEA fellow Kat Meads, is out now from Sagging Meniscus Press. Through an investigation of the lives of ten famous and infamous women, Meads reveals the contradictions present in the stories, biographies, and portraits that survive them. Meads’s essay “Things Woolfian,” which appears in These Particular Women, was originally published in NER 42.1.
Blair Hurley’s second novel, Minor Prophets, was just released by Ig Publishing on April 18. The book follows a young woman’s upbringing in a militant apocalyptic religious cult led by her father, and the ways her past follows her into adulthood. Author Liz Harmer raved about the work, writing “Hurley peers deeply and compassionately . . . at the hurt we cause when we make sacrifices to a higher purpose, and at the ordinary love worth scrabbling toward.” Hurley’s short fiction piece “The Annotations” appeared in NER 42.3.
Hot off the press from Alice James Books is Burning Like Her Own Planet, a formally diverse “poetic autobiography” by Vandana Khanna. Former Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal praised Khanna’s work, saying her sonnets “seduce as much as they startle, speaking back to these ancient South Asian stories to critique and finally redefine what it means to be a girl and goddess.” Khanna’s poems have appeared in multiple editions of New England Review, most recently in issue 41.1.
Debut poet Emily Lee Luan uses the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem in 回 / Return, out now from Nightboat Books. Following the thread of the “reversible” poem, 回 / Return looks back to an imagined childhood through the lens of the Taiwanese diasporic experience, chasing questions about melancholy, origin, and fracture. Luan, a Middlebury alumna, interned with NER in the summer of 2014.
Copper Canyon Press recently published Dean Rader’s ekphrastic poetry collection Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. In this inventive work, Rader, a T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize winner, decodes and responds to the art of Cy Twombly with precision and verve. Rader’s poems “Troubled by Thoughts . . .” and “Once Again in Thought . . .” appeared in NER volume 40.4, and were performed by the author in episode nine of NER Out Loud.
Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.