“With incisive pluck, Rosenwaike’s stories turn an empathetic and humorous eye on the time in women’s lives when the question of motherhood—whether gained or lost or desired at all—is central. Rosenwaike fearlessly plumbs the depths of women’s interior lives, giving due space to their complexity, gravity, and lightness.” –Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk
From the publisher: A candid, ultimately buoyant debut story collection about the realities of the “baby years,” whether you’re having one or not. The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or–having recently given birth–are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its portrayal of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about some of women’s most intimate experiences. Together, these twelve empathetic stories reveal pregnancy and new motherhood in all its anxiety and absurdity, darkness and wonder.
Polly Rosenwaike has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The New York Times Book Review, Glimmer Train, The Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and lives in Ann Arbor with her family. Her short story “Tanglewood” appeared in NER 35.1 (2014)
Look How Happy I’m Making You can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.
“This powerful collection reads like an elegy and a confession, like a slap to the face followed by a plaintive kiss, like watching bad things happen and knowing that you’re complicit. Yet cutting through every one of these essential poems is a gritty, naturalistic beauty that makes me want to read them again and again. Tap Out is a gem, and Edgar Kunz is a major talent.” —Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and Townie
From the publisher: Approach these poems as short stories, plainspoken lyric essays, controlled arcs of a bildungsroman, and then again as narrative verse. Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s debut collection, reckons with his working class heritage. Within are poignant, troubling portraits of blue-collar lives, mental health in contemporary America, and what is conveyed and passed on through touch and words–violent, or simply absent.
Edgar Kunz was born and raised in New England. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the MacDowell Colony, Vanderbilt University, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches at Goucher College and in the MFA program at Salve Regina University. His poem “In the Supply Closet at Illing Middle” appeared in NER 36.4 (2015).
Tap Out can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.
“Reading this collection of essays is like taking a walk through your neighborhood with a wizard or a medieval saint: Lia Purpura can conjure visions from seed pods, a plastic bag, a city sidewalk, transforming what is right in front of you into what is really there, uncommon, untamed. Under her gaze, the most ordinary things become not just extraordinary, but almost frighteningly radiant.” –Suzanne Berne, author of The Dogs of Littlefield
From the publisher: A trailblazer of the contemporary essay, Purpura meditates on existential subjects as diverse as eagles, irony, shadows, racially-divided neighborhoods, and the idea of beauty.
Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations. On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, and elsewhere. The title essay of All the Fierce Tethers appeared in NER 37.3 (2016). She lives in Baltimore, MD.
All the Fierce Tethers can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.
“With nothing less than the human condition on its mind, The Silk Road works in archetype and allegory to produce a slim (not even 150 pages!) but resounding book unlike any you’ve ever read”—Entertainment Weekly
From the publisher: The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.
Kathryn Davis is the author of seven novels, most recently Duplex. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University. Her stories “Floggins” and “Eternity” appeared in NER in 1989 (11.3) and 1982 (5.1), respectively.
The Silk Road can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.
“Tony Hoagland offers us in his poetry one of the most distinctive voices of our time. Now, in this last work of criticism he completed, he gives us a book focused directly on how a poetic voice is created, how the poet establishes a vivid personality who seems to be standing behind every line, and how in the course of the poem the poet manages to close the distance between speaker and reader to create an intimate bond. Everyone who cares about poetry will profit from this practical and luminous book.” — Carl Dennis, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Practical Gods
From the publisher: An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice.In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning—but above all, alive.
Tony Hoagland (1953—2018) was the award-winning author of seven poetry collections, including the National Book Critics Circle Finalist What Narcissism Means to Me and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, and two essay collections. He taught at the University of Houston and conducted a community workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lived. He partnered with Martin Shaw in the translation of four Celtic poems which appeared in NER 39.3 (2018). This work was a sample from the forthcoming book of translations from Celtic poetry, Rough Gods, which will be published by Graywolf in 2020.
The Art of Voice can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.
Edgar Kunz reads “After the Hurricane” (originally published in the Indiana Review) at the 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.