“Mr. Holdefer is an abundantly gifted, witty writer. His creation, his delightful doppelganger Blast, is a funny, goofy, erudite, Baron Munchausen of magic.” —Tom Frame in Genii Magazine
From the publisher: Charles Holdefer has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world’s longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full color by Royce M. Becker.
Charles Holdefer, author of four novels, including The Contractor and Back In The Game, grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France. His short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines including New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, The Antioch Review, World Literature Today, and New York Journal of Books. Read his essay “Orwell’s Hippopotamus, or The Writer as Historical Anachronism,” published in NER 32.3 and his short story “Big and Nasty,” published in NER 37.1.
Magic Even You Can Do: By Blast is available from the publisher here, or can be found at your local independent bookstore.
“With Lynne Thompson’s new collection FRETWORK, one feels spurred on by the cherished care of the American emigrant story, which is to say, the buttressing and fortifying of the dream with all of its inglorious and joyous plots and twists.” —Major Jackson
Winner of the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.
Lynne Thompson is the author of three chapbooks and the poetry collections START WITH A SMALL GUITAR, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and FRETWORK. She received Honorable Mention in Pushcart Prize XLII, an Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, and was a finalist for the 2018 Toi Derricotte/Cornelius Eady Chapbook Award. Thompson serves as Reviews & Essays Editor for the literary journal Spillway. Thompson was born in Los Angeles, California, and received a BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern Law School. Read her poem “Langston won’t stay in his grave,” in NER 39.4.
Fretwork can be purchased here, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time.” — Diane Seuss
From the publisher: Paris Review Staff Pick; A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection; Recommended by Buzzfeed News; A Rumpus Book Club Pick; One of Nylon’s Best Books to Read in 2019; One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019.
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her poem “The Price of Rain,” was featured in NER 37.4, and performed at the annual NER Out Loud event in February 2017. Listen to it here.
Soft Science can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“Nouns & Verbs is a lifelong manifesto on joy and vigor, a message in a bottle for all of us who ‘scrabble within the skin of time / like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor.’” —U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith
From the publisher: A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers.
Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 27.3 and 35.1. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.
Nouns & Verbs can be purchased from the publisher here or found at your local independent bookseller.
“‘To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices’ is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance. . . .What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” —Kaveh Akbar, The Paris Review
From the publisher: In Reenactments, Hai-Dang Phan grapples with the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as the son of Vietnamese refugees. Through a kaleidoscope of poetic forms, the past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles providing urgent perspectives on conflicts both private and public.
Hai-Dang Phanwas born in Vietnam in 1980 and grew up in Wisconsin. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2016, and the New England Review in NER 36.4 and 38.2. He is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. He currently teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Reenactments is his first book. Read his poem “My Mother Says the Syrian Refugees Look Like Tourists” here.
Reenactments can be purchased from the publisher here, or found at your local independent bookseller.
“…Mills proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet’s ability to manage enormous shifts of scale… Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather’s ‘involvement in the Nagasaki mission,’ Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors’ accounts, and sifts through white sands…Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
From the publisher: Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge—particularly of the atomic bombs the US dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the US conducted throughout the twentieth century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author’s grandfather’s possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.
Tyler Mills is the author of two books of poems, Hawk Parable (winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Poetry, and the New England Review, in NER 36.3. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center, and scholarships/fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee, the Chicago native is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands University, editor-in-chief of The Account, and a resident of Santa Fe, NM.
Hawk Parable can be purchased here from the publisher, or found at your local independent bookseller.
