Start your summer reading list early with these new titles by NER authors! Part 1 of our May roundup includes innovative and sharp-witted poetry, a debut novel with profound interiority, and a memoir about growing up on a famous Rhode Island farm. Look out for Part 2, and shop these titles and more on our Bookshop.org page.
West: A Translation, Paisley Rekdal’s seventh collection of poetry, was released from Copper Canyon Press at the start of the month. Praised as “heartbreaking and intense, but also full of the pleasures of closely observed detail and imagination given free rein,” West: A Translation traces the completion of the transcontinental railroad and its connection to the Chinese Exclusion Act (Publisher’s Weekly). Former Utah Poet Laureate, Rekdal is a longtime NER contributor whose work most recently appeared in issue 39.4.
From Loom Press comes Carla Panciera’s Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir. Author Holly Robinson described this captivating work as a love letter to Panciera’s father, “a man who became so famous among dairy farmers that he was even profiled in Esquire magazine.” A tender and sober portrait of the bond between father and daughter, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir captures “a vanishing part of our history.” Panciera has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently issue 36.2.
Graywolf Press published Jennifer Grotz’s highly anticipated poetry collection, Still Falling, in early May. Featuring three poems originally published in NER, Still Falling contends with the various facets of loss, whether it be from death, the end of a relationship, or the closing of a chapter of one’s life. The director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Grotz’s poetry and translations have been published in multiple issues of New England Review, with her piece “Poem or Story” appearing in issue 42.2.
Forthcoming NER contributor Karin Lin-Greenberg’s debut novel, You Are Here, is hot off the press from Counterpoint. As a once-bustling mall prepares to shut its doors for the final time, the residents of an upstate New York town must reckon with a shocking act that forces them to reevaluate who they are in this “remarkable study of ordinary people’s extraordinary inner lives” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Lin-Greenberg will make her NER debut in issue 44.2.
Ian Ganassi’s second poetry collection, True for the Moment, was published late last month by David Robert Books. Humorously wounding, inquisitive, and sharp-edged, True for the Moment was called “a book for our times, for the reality show we do not want to be part of & yet cannot avoid” by poet Mark Young. Ganassi’s translation of Book 7 of the Aeneid was published in issue 37.2, and was discussed by the author in a “Behind the Byline” interview with editor Carolyn Kuebler.
Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.