Our authors have had a busy publication schedule this October! Some of their new books this month include include a mock-epic poem from Sydney Lea, a debut full-length poetry collection from Carlos Andrés Gómez, a series of personal essays from Peter LaSalle, a volume of poetry from Fiona Sze-Lorrain and a collection of essays from Michael Cohen.
Find them and more from the fall on the New England Review‘s new bookshelf at Bookshop.org.
New England Review is pleased to present, along with partners in the departments of Chinese and Literary Studies, the amazingly accomplished and versatile poet, translator, and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain. She’ll read from and discuss her new collection of poetry, The Ruined Elegance, and her translations of Chinese poetry, in particular Sea Summit, the new collection by Yi Lu. We first met Fiona through her translations of Yin Lichuan, which we published in 36.2.
Doors open at 7 for reception with light refreshments; the reading begins at 7:30. Books, cocktails, and other beverages will be available to purchase. The event is free and open to the public. Please join us at 51 Main at the Bridge, in Middlebury!
Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s latest poetry collection, The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2015), was named by Library Journal as one of its “Best Books 2015: Poetry” and was a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Sea Summit (Milkweed Editions, 2015), her book of translations by the Chinese poet Yi Lu was shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. Sze-Lorrain works in English, French, and Chinese, and serves as an editor at Vif Éditions, an independent press in Paris. She is also an accomplished zheng harpist.
Sponsored by the Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese Language and Literature, New England Review, and the Program in Literary Studies at Middlebury College.
Translation from NER 36.2.
I want to go to Korea
I want to go to the Square
to the floral-printed North Korea
a holiday with the Koreans:
flowers in torrential waves
old people and children arranged into squares
young smiles frozen into walls
women with gazes like torches
leader standing before his portrait
all walk at the same pace
—translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Yin Lichuan, poet, fiction writer, film director, and scriptwriter, rose to literary notoriety as a founder and the most prominent member of the “Lower Body” movement, based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Born in 1973 in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, she studied French at Beijing University and earned a graduate degree in filmmaking in Paris at École supérieure libre d’études cinématographiques (ESEC). Her publications include a collection of selected writings, Feel a Bit More Comfort (2001); a novel, Bitch (2002); and three volumes of poetry, Karma (2006), Wet Paint (2007), and The Doors (2015). A volume of selected poems, Karma, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Since 2006, Yin has devoted herself to filmmaking; her debut feature, The Park, was released in 2007, and Knitting premiered at the Cannes Festival in 2008. She lives in Beijing.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of two poetry collections, My Funeral Gondola (El Leon Literary Arts, 2013) and Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010), and several translations of contemporary Chinese, French, and American poets. She lives in France and works as a zheng harpist and editor.
Mesmerizing and beautiful in the language and rhythms of his pen. ―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
We congratulate NER contributor Reginald Dwayne Betts on the recent release of his poetic collection Bastards of the Reagan Era (Stahlecker Selections). His work appeared in NER 35.5.
Regniald Dwayne Bett’s Shahid Reads His Own Palm won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. He is a Yale Law student.
Bastards of the Reagan Era is available from independent booksellers.
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Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period’s most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter . . . Dazzling. —David Wojahn, Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa
We are also pleased to announce Komunyakaa‘s collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. He teaches at New York University.
The Emperor of Water Clocks is available from independent booksellers.
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A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy.—Publishers Weekly
NER is pleased to announce the publication of Linda Gregerson‘s first book of collected work, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books). Gregerson’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently NER 31.4.
Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.
Prodigal is available from independent booksellers.
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Shards of elegy, lament, intermittent flashes of wit, a philosophical sensuality throughout: this is subtle, sophisticated, gorgeous, and unsettling work by a poet open to being ‘torn by the lyric’ as well as history. Sze-Lorrain aims ‘to honor / the invisible,’ ‘to get silence right’: she does. —Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets
Fiona Sze-Lorrain‘s The Ruined Elegance: Poems has been published by Princeton University Press. Her work appears in NER 35.2.
Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell, writes of Ruined Elegance: “The luminous art of Sze-Lorrain reveals how imaginative vision requires the veil. Hers is a contemporary, polycultural poetry, a language of distance and silence, rich with suggestion. The disparate, brilliant images of her Ruined Elegance fend off narrative, ‘torn by the lyric,’ whose instrument is more enduring than its players: its ‘strings stayed taut. None / broke. Her fingernails did.'”
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist. The author of two previous books of poetry in English, My Funeral Gondola and Water the Moon, she also writes and translates in French and Chinese. She lives in Paris.
The Ruined Elegance: Poems is available from Princeton University Press and independent booksellers.
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Whether in praise songs, appraisals, or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace . . . The result is an extraordinary and ultimately irreducible debut. —Terrance Hayes, judge
Rickey Laurentiis has released his latest collection, Boy with Thorn, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Laurentiis’s work appeared in NER‘S Volume 36.2.
Laurentiis, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Boy with Thorn is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press and independent booksellers.
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A superbly personal biography that pulsates with intelligence, scholarship, and heart. —Kirkus Review
NER is pleased to announce that founding editor Jay Parini’s 
Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal was recently published with Doubleday Books. Parini’s work, including “An Interview with Gore Vidal” (NER 14.1), has appeared in multiple NER issues.
Parini has published over two dozen books, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Last Station, Robert Frost: A Life, and The Apprentice Lover. He is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. He has received honorary degrees from Lafayette College and the University of Scranton. Currently, Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College.
Parini’s access to Vidal and his thoughtful reflections on him establish this as the definitive biography of a major writer. — Publisher’s Weekly.
Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal is available from Doubleday Books and independent booksellers.