Fady Joudah

Spring continues to be a busy season for NER authors — particularly our poets! Kerrin McCadden released American Wake (Black Sparrow Press), a book of poetry that explores the author’s Irish identity as well as “family, death and grief, apologies, and all manner of departures.” McCadden’s poem, “The Magpie: A Key” was published in NER 40.3.

Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for her book Four-Legged Girl, recently published frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press). This candid collection of sonnets chronicles “a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again.” Seuss’s poem “Memento Mori” was featured in NER 36.4.

Fady Joudah’s latest release, Tethered to Stars: Poems (Milkweed Editions), “inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire.” Joudah’s poetry has appeared in NER 38.4.

Cortney Lamar Charleston, published in NER 37.2, released his much anticipated second volume of poetry, Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books). The collection “examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.”

You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.

The Professor of Immortality is a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom. It’s also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest and most companionable novelists out there. —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

From the publisher: Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. In the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death, Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that her son might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him.

Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York; the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic; and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Pollack has published many times in NER, and her most recent contribution, “Ranch House,” can be found in NER 32.4.

The Professor of Immortality can be purchased through HarperCollins Publishers or from your local bookstore.

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

From the publisher: Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Betts has been published in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

Felon can be purchased directly from the publisher or from your local, independent bookstore.

Impressive in its precise articulation and range of insights, [Timothy] Donnelly’s dazzling third collection extends the thematic reach of his 2010 Kingsley Tufts Award–winning The Cloud Corporation. Charting the underbelly of Western capitalism, the speakers in Donnelly’s poems locate the imperialist impulse in humanity’s distant origins. From gut flora to galaxies, these poems offer glimpses “that waver like air above lit candles,” restoring meaning to the world in the process. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage point—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great.

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family. His work appears in NER 40.1.

The Problem of the Many can be bought from Wave Books or from your local bookstore.

From the publisher: Through vivid imagery that celebrates the world, Boruch meditates on memory and time, and the process of living with, and working through, grief. Boruch’s poems challenge typical associations with the subject, exposing new facets of a universal feeling.

Marianne Boruch has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and often in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Boruch has published frequently in NER, most recently with the essay “In the Archives of the Humanly Possible: Two Rooms” in NER 37.1.

The Anti-Grief can be purchased through Copper Canyon Press or from an independent bookstore.

In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old. —The New York Times

From the publisher: In celebration of the prize’s centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Carl Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and has served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets since 2010. His own books of poetry include Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. He is a frequent contributor to NER, and his work appears most recently in NER 37.1.

Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets includes works by NER authors such as Maura Stanton, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholas Samaras, Richard Siken, Valerie Wohlfeld, Ellen Hinsey, Fady Joudah, Eduardo C. Corral, Noah Warren, and others. This anthology can be purchased from the publisher.