New England Review

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seventh volume of poetry, Selected Poems 1983-2020 (House of Anansi Press), Steven Heighton brings together previously unpublished works as well as key poems from past acclaimed collections to create a volume that showcases what critics have called “a defining lyric poet of his generation.”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.

Join us in Tampa!

NER 40th anniversary reading

New England Review celebrates forty consecutive years of publishing new voices in poetry, fiction, and essays with a reading at the 2018 AWP Conference in Tampa, FL. The five featured authors have appeared in NER as early as 1978 and as recently as 2018!

Join us Friday, March 9 at 12 pm, in the Tampa Convention Center (Room 14, First Floor) and hear some of the authors who have distinguished and sustained NER through the past four decades.

Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels. She has been the recipient of the Kafka Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is Hurst Sr. Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work first appeared in NER 1.2 (1978), under the name Kathryn Ungerer, and as recently as NER 34.1.

Kate Lebo‘s essay “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in NER 35.2, was anthologized in Best American Essays 2015. Her essay “The Unsealed Ear” appeared a year later in 36.4. She’s the author of a cookbook Pie School, and currently at work on her first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Cate Marvin is a visiting professor at Colby College. Her most recent book of poems is Oracle (Norton, 2015). She has published her poetry frequently in NER , beginning in NER 19.2 (1998) and as recently as NER 36.1 (2016).

Hai-Dang Phan‘s debut collection of poems, Reenactments, will be published by Sarabande in spring 2019. He is a 2017 NEA Fellow in Literature and the author of the chapbook Small Wars. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry, in addition to NER, most recently in 38.2. He was the 2016 winner of the NER/Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Emerging Writers Award.

C. Dale Young is author of The Affliction, a novel-in-stories, and four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Halo. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, he practices medicine full-time. He first published his poetry in NER 17.3 (1995), and then served as poetry editor for nearly 20 years. A new poem will appear in NER 39.1.

 

Kate Lebo

The Loudproof Room

Nonfiction from NER 35.2.

[View as PDF] 

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An Earmoir

I was born with a strawberry hemangioma splashed over the bottom half of my right ear and two inches down my neck. The sort of red that has purple trapped inside it. A swollen, shocking hue. For the first year, I had no hair to disguise it. The sight of me made strangers uncomfortable.

My birthmark was so red and angry and I cried so murderously when my parents bathed it that it became, as I grew, the explanation for a lot of things. Why I was teased in school, why I cried easily. Why I couldn’t hear conversational tones out of my right ear.

By the time I was ten the skin faded to a mottle of mostly normal looking tissue. It looks enough like a burn scar that no one asks what happened. Mostly I forget it’s there. When a new friend asks me “what’s up with your ear?” I need a second to remember what she’s talking about. My father and I were in a motorcycle accident when I was five, I say. It tore my ear half off. When she looks sorry for asking, I tell her I was born this way. Which isn’t exactly the truth. If it was, I’d still have a stoplight for an ear.

[Read more]

Kate Lebo’s poems and prose have appeared in Best New Poets, the Rumpus, Gastronomica, Willow Springs, and Poetry Northwest. She is also the author of two books about the folk art of pie-making, A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press, 2013) and Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour, and Butter (Sasquatch Books, 2014). She teaches writing workshops nationally. For more, visit katelebo.com.

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