New England Review

Jehanne Dubrow

Small Cups of Shadow

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942.

I

n the diner, no one is eating. Three customers lean on their tall stools, none of them speaking. And behind the counter, a soda jerk bends to retrieve something we can’t see. Like a bartender, his job is to serve lonely people late at night, to pour them drinks, because that’s all they want in front of them: sturdy cups of coffee, cooling and forgotten. 

This is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, one of the best-known American images of the twentieth century. As with many of Hopper’s paintings, the canvas asks us to gaze through a window—the diner seems made almost entirely of glass—to watch people who do not know they’re being watched. A window contradicts itself. Both a barrier and an act of transparency, it keeps us out and lets us in. “No one is there to share what we see,” explains the poet Mark Strand in an essay about Nighthawks, “and no one has come before us. The scene of the picture belongs only to us. And what we experience will be entirely ours.” We stare at the four people in the restaurant as if we are the first ones to discover this sad tableau, and we wonder about the patrons, “What are they thinking?” their faces reduced to the simple shapes of eyes, nose, and mouth. 

There’s a woman at the lunch counter. She was modeled by Hopper’s wife, Jo. But, still, she could be a sex worker, we think, her dress the red of desire, her hair a small, controlled flame. She holds what looks like a matchbook in her hands and studies it. A man in a slick, blue suit sits beside her. He could be her john. They are close enough to touch but don’t, his hand curled around a cigarette. They are together. They are apart. We can’t help trying to read a narrative in their bodies. 

Around the corner of the counter, a few seats away, a man sits with his back to us. His suit is made of darkness, his film noir fedora casting more dusk across the side of his face. He is the mood of America in early 1942, Pearl Harbor having been bombed only a month and a half before the completion of the painting. It’s possible to see menace in him, the posture of a threat. He might be a man about to trade his suit in for another kind of uniform. Or, perhaps, he’s old enough to remember the last war, the acrid swirl of mustard gas, the instant coffee he drank from a tin cup at the front. 

The diner cuts a hard angle into the street; other buildings positioned behind it appear flattened and two-dimensional, like a set for a play. As is often the way with Hopper’s work, even the lighting here is theatrical. Inside the restaurant, on this night of solitude, no fluorescent lighting has ever been this sallow, has ever cast such a queasy, green glow across the floor. And the only door visible in the diner leads to the kitchen, not to the world outside. If these people wish to go, they will have to leave by an exit out of view, off stage. 

When I was a young woman, I worked as a barista in a tiny coffee shop. And, although I poured many shots of espresso, steamed gallons of milk over the years, most of my days were spent brewing vats of coffee. I learned to expect the burn of hot liquid spilled on my hands, the coffee slopping over the rim of the paper cup as I covered it with a plastic lid. I learned to expect the smell of stale beans in the seams of my clothes. Still that initial sip of bitterness each morning never stopped surprising me, even when I came to like it. 

Coffee is what we drink to wake up or to stay awake. It’s the drink of early risers and workaholics. Also insomniacs. As adults, many of us come to crave this brown sludge, surely the very definition of an acquired taste. When I was a barista, my first customers of the day always ordered their coffee black, no milk or sugar to soften its sharp edge. The customers who came in just before I closed the store for the evening took theirs straight as well, often on their way to the late shift at the hospital down the street.

The shop where I worked was nothing like the diner in Nighthawks. It had brief, smudged windows and a straightforward exit to the outside. But I served many people who resembled the ones in the painting. I watched them ruminate over their small cups of shadow, alone even in their togetherness. “What is it about Hopper?” asks Olivia Lang in The Lonely City. “He never much liked the idea that his paintings could be pinned down, or that loneliness was his métier, his central theme.”

Haven’t we all hunched over our coffees like this, Hopper’s theme equally our own? At some late hour, we have all felt utterly by ourselves in rooms where the light seemed suddenly strange, so green, as if rendered with meticulous brushstrokes. How still we have sat in the sickly, bitter light.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, Throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in NER as well as in Poetry, Southern Review, and Colorado Review, among others. “Small Cups of Shadow” is part of her second book of creative nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, which will be published by Columbia University Press in 2022.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or architecture.

April 2021

New Books by NER Authors

It’s been a busy publication month for NER authors! Emily Pittinos, published in NER 40.1, released her debut book of poems, The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press), a compilation of tender reflections both elegiac and ecological rooted in the domestic and natural worlds.

Essayist, poet, and pie lady Kate Lebo recently published The Book of Difficult Fruit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of twenty-six lyrical essays (with recipes) centered on fruit, giving “insights into relationships, self-care, land stewardship, medical and botanical history, and so much more.” Her essays have appeared in NER 35.2 and 36.4.

Jehanne Dubrow’s Wild Kingdom (LSU Press) is a book of poetry that explores the landscape of academia and holds a mirror to its inhabitants, asking within its pages “how scholars and educators can work to ensure that institutions of higher learning continue to nurture students and remain places of rigorous critical thinking.” Dubrow has been published frequently in NER, most recently with the poem “What Do You Give the War That Has Everything” in NER 41.2.

In his seventh volume of poetry, Selected Poems 1983-2020 (House of Anansi Press), Steven Heighton brings together previously unpublished works as well as key poems from past acclaimed collections to create a volume that showcases what critics have called “a defining lyric poet of his generation.” Heighton’s past work has been featured in NER 35.1 and 38.3.

Dan O’Brien, acclaimed poet, playwright, and former Guggenheim Fellow in Drama, published A Story That Happens (CB Editions), a series of four essays that “offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, ‘afraid and hopeful’, we begin to tell them.” O’Brien’s performance piece, “The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage” was featured in NER 38.3 and his memoir, “Dear Brother,” appeared in NER 40.2.

Finally, Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner and NER’s new staff reader in poetry, Tiana Nobile, released her debut poetry collection Cleave (Hub City Press). In its conversations, the book “grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience” while exploring the nature of familial relationships and love.

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

New Books from NER Authors

With Dots & Dashes, Jehanne Dubrow gives us a panoramic view of the landscape of marriage within the structure and confines of military life. This difficult and layered collection refuses to avert its gaze from trouble in all its overt and nuanced forms… Dots & Dashes is a series of messages called out over the waters of a life—isolation, separation, the silences and failures of communication—a reminder that sailors are not always the ones who are lost at sea. —Brian Turner, author of Phantom Noise 

From the publisher: Moving between the languages of love and war, Jehanne Dubrow’s latest book offers valuable testimony to the experiences of military wives. Frequently employing rhyme, meter, and traditional forms, these poems examine what it means to be both a military spouse and an academic, straddling two communities that speak in very different and often conflicting terms.

Born in Italy, Dubrow grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is now an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Texas, where she teaches advanced poetry workshops among other courses. Dubrow is a contributor of book reviews to Southern Review, New York Times Magazine, and Hudson Review. Her poetry most recently appeared in NER in 36.1, with her poem “Reading Sappho in Pensacola.”

Dots & Dashes can be purchased directly from its publisher, Southern Illinois University Press.

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Hardy writes his poems as though he is one with nature, and absorbing every little sound and flutter around him. —Introduction to Rural and Regional Studies, Southwest State University

From the publisher: In Domestication: Collected Poems (1996-2016), Rob Hardy brings together the wide range of gifts that place him among the few whose common touch makes them exceptional. In work that is at once accessible, enjoyable, and wonderfully well-made Hardy shows, without pretentious display, that poetry is not an outsider’s cryptic game. His poems demonstrate what Henry David Thoreau teaches: That profundity may best be found in simplicity. Hardy gracefully combines his deep knowledge of the ancient classics and his wide interest in scientific learning with his first-hand experience of nature and human relationships.

Rob Hardy’s adaptation offers a stripped-down style in which every word counts and immediacy trumps Aeschylean grandeur. . . . Hardy has succeeded in producing a script that is evocative and unhurried. It engages with today’s concerns alongside those of fifth-century Athens. — Eric Dugdale, Didaskalia

From the publisher: Rob Hardy’s adaptation of the classic Greek trilogy renders Aeschylus’s tale of family revenge and civic justice in vivid, graceful poetry. This one-play version captures the intent and grandeur of the original and reads as compelling drama.

Hardy lives in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intermittently teaches Latin and Greek at Carleton College, serves on the school board, plays the lowest bells in the community handbell ensemble, hosts a monthly poetry reading series, and reads books by neglected writers. His essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, New Letters, Ploughshares, Critical Flame, Sonora Review, and in various scholarly journals. Rob was most recently featured in the pages of NER 37.2 with his essay “Deceit only was forbidden: A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde.”

Domestication can be purchased directly from the publisher, Shipwreckt Books, or from various independent booksellers. Hardy’s translation of The Oresteia is for sale from the bookstore of the Hero Now Theater.

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From the accomplished poet, scholar, and international correspondent for the New England Review comes a broad-ranging series of interviews with the enormously influential Tomas Venclova that is as sure to interest even casual readers of Eastern European literature as it is to prove indispensable to scholars in the field.

From the publisher: Ellen Hinsey‘s Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova is a book in the European tradition of works such as Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksander Wat’s classic My Century. The book interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature. Venclova, who personally knew Akhmatova, Pasternak, Milosz, Brodsky, and many others, was also one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. Magnetic North provides an in-depth account of ethical choices and artistic resistance to totalitarianism over a half century.

Ellen Hinsey is the International Correspondent for New England Review. Based in Paris since 1987, she witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Hinsey is the author of six books of poetry and translation, and her translations from French have been published with Riverhead/Penguin. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Die Welt, Paris Review, Poetry, and New England Review (most recently in NER 37.4 with her essay, “Poland’s Illiberal Challenge“). A former Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she teaches at Skidmore College’s Program in Paris.

Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova can be found online or at independent booksellers.

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Surely every poem desires to be read and read again. Zana Previti’s poems deserve it. The poems of Previti’s first collection, Providence, possess the rare capacity to make the personal appear universal and the universal appear personal. She blends present and historical time, immediate and distant place, and she applies layer after layer of rich details in lines that vary from a terse, trimeter-like pace to Whitmanic lines that threaten to sweep beyond the margins. —Ron McFarland, Professor at the University of Idaho and author of  Strange in Town: New and Selected Poems. 

“In language at once spare and unsparing, Zana Previti’s staggeringly wide-ranging and pitch-perfect Providence takes us from the ‘immense / old age of the Atlantic’ through war-time starvation experiments, family, Kung Fu movies, Greek myth, bathtub mystery novel reading, a Galveston hurricane, environmental degradation, and King Lear—reckoning in deeply humane ways with individual and historically-aware questions of the human capacity for suffering and love. ‘These stones are the generations / upon which we build images of the end of us,’ she writes, using her formal and lyrical skills to again and again find these ‘images of the end’ and their complex corollaries in our continuance and living. ‘Kill us if you will / but kill us in the light,’ Ajax is quoted as crying, and this poem—which is like nothing you’ve ever quite seen before—is a new, acute light.” –Alexandra Teague, author of the poetry collections The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography, and Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts

Zana Previti, whose story “The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso” appeared in NER 32.4,  was born and raised in New England. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. She was recently named the recipient of Poetry International’s 2014 C. P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona. Previti teaches at English at Fairmont State University in West Virginia, and Providence is her first published poetry chapbook.

Providence can be purchased directly from the publisher, Finishing Line Press.

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Completed over a century ago but unpublished until now, Schnitzler’s droll, engrossing short novel of artists in 1890s Vienna tempers its satire with keen insight. . . . Readers are fortunate to have this late publication. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Eduard Saxberger is a quiet man who is getting on in years and has spent the better part of them working at a desk in an office. Once upon a time, however, he published a book of poetry, Wanderings, and one day when he returns from his usual walk he finds a young man waiting for him. “Are you,” he wants to know, “Saxberger the poet?” Is Saxberger Saxberger the poet? Was he ever a poet? A real poet? Late Fame, an unpublished novella recently rediscovered in the papers of the great turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler [and translated from the German by Alexander Starritt], is a bittersweet parable of hope lost and found.

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. He was born in Vienna in 1862 and died there in 1931, and the city often served as the setting for his works. During his lifetime, Schnitzel’s works were often censored for their psychoanalytical exploration of explicit sexual encounters; the author himself was a contemporary and correspondent of Freud. After his death, Schnitzel’s writing was deemed “Jewish filth” by Hitler, and was burned publicly in Germany and Austria alongside the works of Einstein, Marx, Kafka, and other Jewish intelligentsia. In 1997 in NER 18.1, a translation of his story, “The Dead Are Silent,” appeared, a story which illustrates his and Freud’s shared obsession with the Eros-Thanatos complex.

Late Fame can be purchased online directly from its publisher, New York Review Books, or at your local independent bookstore.

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Can mournfulness be wry? Can irony be heartfelt? Yes, when the writer is as insightful as Lynne Sharon Schwartz, her voice urgent with life even as she speaks about death. From Veronica Lake to her old boyfriends to lost family members, a whole peopled world is created for us here, at the intersection of memory and dream.—Linda Pastan, former Poet Laureate of Maryland 

“A poet of poise and power. No Way Out but Through, [Lynne Sharon] Schwartz‘s third collection of poems, showcases some of this writer’s many strengths. She’s a stubborn anti-sentimentalist who can write wrenching elegies. She’s an archivist of memories, a celebrant for the forgotten or nearly forgotten, who also writes eloquently of the undertow of oblivion. She’s an anthologist of anxiety dreams. Irritated by Cordelia and partial to the Fisherman’s Wife, she’s a contrarian reader. At all times, Schwartz’s poetic voice is piercingly honest. Her tough-minded intelligence leaves plenty of room for questions and regrets.”—LA Review of Books

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Schwartz has taught at universities and writing programs across the country, including Bryn Mawr, Columbia, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. She currently teaches at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the Columbia University School of the Arts. Schwartz is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. This is her third poetry collection, and her translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s work “Universal Compassion” appeared in NER 23.1.

No Way Out but Through can be purchased directly from the publisher, University of Pittsburgh Press.

New Books from NER Authors


“First books don’t usually take on the world at this level of seriousness and skill”

Hardship_Post2Jehanne Dubrow‘s first poetry collection, The Hardship Post, is being re-released by Sundress Publications. 

From Stanley Plumly, author of Argument & Song: “There’s a tensile strength of line here—predominantly pentameter—
that underscores the ease of the poetic idiom: just as the heartfelt yet disciplined feeling—life of the content underwrites this collection’s larger themes of Judaism and its ancient traditions. The Hardship Post has a good deal on its mind as well as the load in its heart. Polish history and heritage may be one personal focus, but displacement and identity are the greater subjects. First books don’t usually take on the world at this level of seriousness and skill.”

The Hardship Post includes work previously published in NER. Dubrow’s poetry has appeared in NER 26.2 and 30.2. 

 

 

Bangalore“gritty, hard-hitting debut”

NER contributor Kerry James Evans has published his first book of poetry, Bangalore, with Copper Canyon Press. Appearing in Bangalore is “A Good Hunt,” originally published in NER 30.2.

From Publishers Weekly: “Evans’s gritty, hard-hitting debut combines war poems, elegies, and high Southern lyrics to create a new understanding of American identity.”

From Brian Spears of The Rumpus: “Evans spares nothing and no one in his poems, and yet he still finds a way to celebrate what deserves celebrating, and in the end, we’re left with hope.”

 

Every Possible Blue“tender observation[s] not of the clothing but of the wearer”

We are pleased to announce that NER author Matthew Thorburn‘s new book of poetry, Every Possible Blue, has been published by CW Books. Thorburn’s poem “Proof” appeared in NER 30.1.

From Publishers Weekly: “Saturated with color and light, Thorburn’s second collection celebrates New York with deft, vivacious strokes. Similar to the way a city is always rebuilt, or a painter reworks a canvas, Thorburn’s poems pay special attention to the clothing and adornments that change to fit life’s varied occasions. ‘Oh to be crisply cuffed, / something in fall flannel to flatter / this flaneur,’ he writes in ‘Men Swear.’ An airy poem describing a white blouse—’like a sail’ with ‘two buttons un / done / a peek of pale breast / bone’—becomes a tender observation not of the clothing but of the wearer. But ‘inky / silks, slinky satins’ don’t fool Thorburn. No matter what people wear, whether it is a second-hand tuxedo or a ‘mint green’ sari, he reminds himself, ‘you’re human, / you’re human.'”

 

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