New England Review

Lucia Perillo

Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

Poetry from NER 36.3

1.
It starts with a dead animal: whenever she finds one
when walking the dogs up in the hills,
Jane puts the carcass in a cage on the roof
in order to bring up the bone-curls and -fractals.
Otherwise she’d have to dig
slantwise through the manglement, it’s best
to leave that to the professionals, the sun
and the maggots, the distant star and the grub inside, it’s best
to put on some music. Best not to listen
for any decibels of little mandibles.

[Read more]

Lucia Perillo’s new book, Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.

Nightingale Droppings Can Also Brighten Your Kimono

From Lucia Perillo’s “To Nightingales” (NER 25.1, 2004):

There is a bird for just about any kind of grief:
loon for the operatic grief, woodpecker for grief that comes like a hammer
and nightingales for the grief that is a fantasy—
face it, nightingales: here in the New World you don’t even exist.

* * *

And yet I hear you calling out from cyberspace,
your song that is constant while we grow old—
Keats said it first, and now a click on your breast
gives anyone ten seconds of your unchanging pennywhistle.

[read more]

New Books from NER Authors

Sarah Manguso 

The Guardians

“Manguso’s writing manages, in carefully honed bursts of pointed, poetic observation, to transcend the darkness and turn it into something beautiful.”—Heller McAlpin, Barnes and Noble

 

 

 

Traci Brimhall

Our Lady of the Ruins

Winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Our Lady of the Ruins tracks a group of women through their pilgrimage in a mid-apocalyptic world.  Exploring war, plagues, and the search for a new God in exile, these poems create a chorus of wanderers haunted by empire, God, and personal trauma.

“…part Dylan Thomas, part saint’s legend and part Tolkien.” —Publishers Weekly Review

 

Lucia Perillo

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

“Lucia Perillo isn’t just a strikingly original poet; she’s a top-notch fiction writer as well. The stories in this bleakly funny and harrowing collection are reminiscent of both Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, but the vision than animates them is Perillo’s own, unique and unmistakable.” —Tom Perrotta

 

 

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

“Perillo’s poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions.”—Booklist

 

 

Ira Sadoff

True Faith

“Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation.”–Gerald Stern

 

 

 

Charles Holdefer

Back in the Game

“(Holdefer’s) funny novel describes a maturing pro athlete’s often bumpy transition from youthful dreams to mainstream American life.” —Publisher’s Weekly

 

 

Paisley Rekdal

Animal Eye

“Paisley Rekdal’s quiet virtuosity with rhyme and cadence, her syntactic fidelity to thought and sensation, her analytical intelligence that keeps homing in and in, her ambitious sentences and larger formal structures that try to embody with absolute accuracy the difference between what we ought to feel and what we really do feel—all these make her unique in her generation . . .”—Tom Sleigh

 

Michael Heller

This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010

From his early spare poems written in Spain to the recent ruminative work exploring language, tradition (often Jewish and diasporic) and the self, this book collects four decades of Michael Heller’s “tone perfect poems” as George Oppen described them. Enriched with the detailed landscapes of the phenomenal world and mind, This Constellation Is a Name confirms Michael Heller’s place at the forefront of contemporary American poetry.

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