New England Review

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Jay Parini on Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark

NER 1.1 (1978)

Founding Editor Jay Parini remembers “An Interview with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark,” from NER 1.1 (1978).

One of my fondest memories dates to the summer day when I traveled with Sydney Lea and Robin Barone to visit Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark in West Wardsboro, a tiny Vermont town on the backside of Mount Stratton. The point of the journey was to interview Warren and Clark for an upcoming issue of New England Review. It was a dazzling sunny day, and we followed the complicated instructions, with the usual rural address that was without numbers or, as far as we could tell, even streets. We found their isolated house in the middle of the woods, near a deep pond. And we sat for hours on their screened-in porch and talked about everything from literature to politics. They were both such vivid talkers, and we had masses of good material to edit down. Warren was Kentucky-born and bred, and his accent remained thick, even after decades in New England. Clark, his wife of many years, was a sharp, ironic Yankee. Their combined intellectual firepower was impressive, and the resulting interview was, I think, a high point for the magazine in its earliest incarnation. I still take it from the shelf and reread it, almost four decades on.

“An Interview with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark“

BUY the BACK ISSUE (1.1)

**

Jay Parini founded New England Review in 1978, with Sydney Lea. He was Editor through volume 1 and then Advisory Editor through volume 4. He is Axinn Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College, and has published numerous novels, biographies, and collections of poems. His novels include The Passages of H. M. (2011), Benjamin’s Crossing (1997), and The Last Station (1990), and his biographies include Robert Frost: A Life (2000) and Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal (2011). He has published numerous other nonfiction books, and his New and Collected Poemswas released in 2015. His reflections on meeting Jorge Luis Borges in Scotland, “A Beer with Borges,” appears in NER 39.1 (2018).

 

 

New Books from NER Authors: March 2018

“What a gift Kazim Ali’s Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. ” —Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

From the publisher: Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress.

Kazim Ali is a poet, editor, and prose writer who teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, and Sky Ward, which won the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry.  His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. His poem “Origin Story” was published in NER 38.1.

Purchase Inquisition from Wesleyan University Press.

 

“Through the language of coding, mathematics, and musical notation, the characters in these stories analyze their worlds through ordered systems of logic that attempt to make sense of the inexplicability of grief and loss.” —Anne Valente

From the publisher: Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker’s sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person.

Matthew Baker is the author of the children’s novel If You Find This, a Booklist Top Ten Debut of 2015 and an Edgar Award Nominee for Best Juvenile Mystery. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, New England Review (“Sensei” in 35.4), Southern Review, Electric Literature, One Story, and elsewhere.

Hybrid Creatures can be purchased directly from the publisher, LSU Press.

 

 

 

“These whimsical, sincere, giddy-making stories are told with the imperative of a fabulist and the precision of a poet. Cadmium overlays syntax and character so that figures of speech and weird tropes of thought and language become solid, consequential and urgent.” —Andrew Tonkovich, Editor, Santa Monica Review

From the publisher: Michael Cadnum‘s Earthquake Murder is a collection of short fiction published in a variety anthologies and magazines in recent years and collected here for the first time. Featuring a foreword by radio and publishing force Andrew Tonkovick, these surprising, often ironic stories capture a world of danger and discovery.

Michael Cadnum is the author of thirty-five books, including the National Book Award Finalist The Book of the Lion, In a Dark Wood, Saint Peter’s Wolf, and Ghostwright. His story “Champion of the Ocean Floor” appeared in NER 20.4.

Earthquake Murder is available for purchase online.

 

 

“Sands Hall’s transcendent memoir, Flunk. Start., describes, with precise and utterly absorbing detail, her experience in the world of Scientology. But this is also astory that explores so many issues—how language is used to both illuminate and obscure, how we long for connection and meaning; it’s also a vivid portrait of how we find a place in our family and find a path through chaos. I could not put down this book—it is a triumph, a work of great honesty and insight. It is a necessary book for our time.” —Karen E. Bender, author of Refund

From the publisher: In Flunk. Start., Sands Hall chronicles her slow yet willing absorption into the Church of Scientology. Her time in the Church, the late 1970s, includes the secretive illness and death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and the ascension of David Miscavige. Hall compellingly reveals what drew her into the religion—what she found intriguing and useful—and how she came to confront its darker sides.

Sands Hall is the author of the novel, Catching Heaven, a Willa Award Finalist for Best Contemporary Fiction, and a Random House Reader’s Circle selection; and of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. She teaches at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Community of Writers, Squaw Valley, and is a Teaching Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Hall lives in Nevada City.

Flunk. Start. can be purchased from Counterpoint Press.

 

“These bracing, vulnerable poems embody the central mystery of poetry: what is riven is made whole.” —James Longenbach

From the publisher: Rest is a vivid, powerful collection examining the human cost of crossing the border. In 2010, Margaree Little was working for a humanitarian mission near Tucson when, along with a group of volunteers, she found the unidentified dead body of a man, who a medical examiner would later estimate died at least six months before. This discovery serves as the jumping-off point to a stunning, elegiac series of poems commemorating an imagined, unknown life. Anchored by Little’s keen eye and unsparing self-reflection, this collection asks us to examine how a single life can affect so many others.

Margaree Little received her BA from Brown University and MFA from Warren Wilson College. The recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and various fellowships, scholarships and residencies, Little teaches creative writing at Kenyon College.

Rest can be purchased online at UPNE Book Partners.

 

 

“Accessible and engaging, Jay Parini’s The Way of Jesus is a cross between a memoir and a travel diary, except the landscape he is exploring is his own soul. The compelling spiritual narrative that results is informed by insight, personal reflection, and wide reading. In his own words, it is all about resurrection—now.” —The Right Reverend Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter

From the publisher: A follow-up to his 2013, Jesus: The Human Face of God, this new book is part spiritual autobiography and part intellectual journey, offering an account of what Parini calls “The Christian Mind” from the viewpoint of a liberal Christian. Throughout this intensely personal guide to living a spiritual and ethical life, he explores the question of what it really means to practice Christianity and draws extensively from readings in world literature and religions, offering synthesis of his five decades of scholarship on the topic.

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015. He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H. M., and The Last Station, the last made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

The Way of Jesus can be purchased directly from the publisher, Beacon Press.

 

“There is no other contemporary voice quite like his, and I believe that, taken as a whole, Kevin Prufer’s prognostic backward gaze may someday prove to have shown us where we were going before we got there.” —Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review

From the publisher: Kevin Prufer‘s How He Loved Them sets love in a fraught, paradoxical world where bombs explode, fields burn, and armies advance. With clear, compassionate eyes, Prufer finds powerful intimacy between fathers and sons, soldiers and civilians, the living and the (sometimes un)dead.

Kevin Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. He teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University. His poem “In the Wheat Field” appeared in NER 36.1.

How He Loved Them can be purchased from Four Way Books.

 

Jay Parini

A Beer with Borges

New nonfiction from NER 39.1

I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn’t.

“View of the Riviera” by Chuka Susan Chesney, courtesy of the Aarnun Gallery.

A writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early forties. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, “shaping.” And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them.

I called him Mr. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. “Just Borges, please.”


[Read more]

 

from NER 39.1
order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

New Books by NER Authors

Eternity and Oranges Cover

This is a beautiful collection of poems: half-cryptic, half-open; half based on ancient myths, half on actual life. —Adam Zagajewski, author of Unseen Hand

NER would like to congratulate Christopher Bakken on the publication of his newest poetry collection, Eternity & Oranges (University of Pittsburgh Press).

From the publisher: The voices we encounter in this book speak from a place marked by disintegration and loss, and they speak on the verge of disappearance, out of desperation and terror. Bakken’s poems are acts of conjuring. They move from the real political landscapes of Greece, Italy, and Romania, into more surreal spaces where history comes alive and the summoned dead speak.

Eternity & Oranges is Bakken’s third collection of poems. Two of Bakken’s poems, “Elegy” and “Myth,” appeared in NER 36.2. He also co-translated The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (Truman State University Press, 2016), and wrote Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table (University of California Press 2013).

Eternity & Oranges is available from University of Pittsburgh Press and independent booksellers.

♦

9780374230449In tones that shift effortlessly from journalistic to atmospheric to deeply, darkly funny, Berlinski evokes a very detailed sense of place. —Publishers Weekly

Mischa Berlinski will release his second novel, Peacekeeping, this month. Set in a small Haitian town, it tells the story of a American sent by the UN to help train the Haitian police. Soon, however, he becomes embroiled in the town’s politics and falls in love with a corrupt judge’s wife.

Berlinski’s first novel Fieldwork was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. His short story “In the Dark” appeared in NER 28.1.

Peacekeeping is available from Macmillan Publishers and other booksellers.

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51iHD7EPWoL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Hernandez is a poet writing to us from poetry’s epicenter—where music invents itself, and the psyche and the sensory world are one. —Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains, and The Raising

Dear, Sincerely (University of Pittsburgh Press), a new poetry collection by David Hernandez, has arrived.

From the publisher: an exploration into the relationship between the Self, the collective We, and the cosmos, as well as the murky division that separates one from the other.

Hernandez’s most recent book of poetry, Hoodwinked (Sarabande, 2011), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. He has also published Always Danger (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003), as well as two young adult novels. His poetry has appeared in NER 32.3 and 35.1.

Dear, Sincerely is available from University of Pittsburgh Press and independent booksellers.

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Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 10.55.42 AMJay Parini is one of those writers who can do anything. —Stacy Schiff, New York Times Book Review

A warm congratulations to NER founding editor Jay Parini on the release of his new poetry collection, New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 (Beacon Press). His work appeared in NER 14.1. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur writes of Parini’s work: “Jay Parini’s poetry in keen-eyed, thoughtful, artful, yet unaffected.”

Parini is the author of over twenty books, including five books of poetry, eight novels, and several biographies. His recent work includes Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal (Doubleday Books, 2015), Jesus: The Face of God (New Harvest, 2013), and The Passages of H.M. (Anchor, 2011). He is the D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College. 

New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 is available from Beacon Press and independent booksellers.  

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Groundspeed CoverIn her powerful new collection, Emilia Phillips gives us a world that refuses to be stilled. Exploring the blurred boundaries of a cartographer’s spinning globe, Groundspeed offers a dynamic exploration of the liminal physical and psychological landscapes in which our tentative and transient identities flicker. —Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City

Emilia Phillips‘s second poetry collection, Groundspeed, arrives this month from University of Akron Press.

Phillips’s poem, “Supine Body in Full-Length Mirror, Hotel Room, Upper West Side,” appeared in NER 36.1. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, US poets in Mexico, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is the author of another poetry collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks.

Groundspeed is available from University of Akron Press and independent booksellers.

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Shipers-FamilyResemblancesAs the narrator sets out “To see myself the size I really am,” we accompany her on this quest back and forth through time and the lives of her family as she uses all instruments available to learn what she must know. —Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of Her Heart: Poems

Carrie Shipers also has a new collection of poetry coming out, entitled Family Resemblances (University of New Mexico Press).

From the publisher: Throughout this beautiful volume, the multiple meanings of family—whether formed by biology or choice—are questioned through careful attention to the often conflicting notions of connection, inheritance, absence, and escape. The truths these poems find are much like life itself: complex, provisional, and rich.

Shipers published her “Anti-Anxiety Poem” in NER 32.4, as well as an essay in NER Digital. She is also the author of Ordinary Mourning and Cause for Concern. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals.

Family Resemblances is available from the University of New Mexico Press and independent booksellers.

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The Halo CoverYoung is a doctor as well as a poet, and [his poetry] demonstrates a skilled physician’s combination of empathy and formal precision. —David Orr, NPR

Congratulations to former NER poetry editor C. Dale Young on the publication of The Halo, a new collection of poetry that tells the story of a man born with wings who wants nothing more than to be simply human.

Young teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, while practicing medicine full-time. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He served as NER‘s poetry editor for 19 years.

Young has published three other collections: Torn (Four Way Books, 2011), The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), and The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, 2001).

The Halo is available from Four Way Books and independent booksellers.

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