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New Books from NER Authors: June 2018

June 18, 2018

From Mark Twain to George Saunders, Bradley Bazzle’s Trash Mountain joins a long tradition of dark humor, wild inventiveness, and social satire in American letters. ―Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza.

From the publisher: Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way.

Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award. His short story “Gift Horse” appeared in NER 31.4. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.

Trash Mountain can be purchased from your independent booksellers and online.


In a time when we confront daily the frenetic, desensitizing maelstrom of political rhetoric and a ubiquitous flood of mass media, Bruce Bond reminds us in Dear Reader of the quiet but urgent philosophical and spiritual inquiries, sometimes monstrous and animal, that define and affirm our humanity. —Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City and Correspondence 

From the publisher: In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world—the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts.

Bruce Bond is the author of sixteen books including For the Lost Cathedral, The Other Sky, and Black Anthem, which won a Tampa Review Prize  in 2016. Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas. His poem “Blood” was published in NER 36.2.

Dear Reader can be purchased directly from the publisher.


Like the birds that populate so many of his poems, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Dulce is a lesson in song, an instructive repetition of the melodies that shape the inner self. The poems here are for a reader willing to mix and remix, to reimagine themselves in a thousand pieces. —Matthew Shenoda, author of Somewhere Else  

From the publisher: Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet. Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a Canto Mundo fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He cofounded the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award from Poets and Writers magazine. His poems “Pulling the Moon” and “Rituals of Healing” appeared in NER 35.2.

Dulce: Poems can be purchased from the publisher.


Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk. ―The New York Times

From the publisher: Tony Hoagland’s poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less skeptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoagland’s poetry has gotten bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces―and spaciousness―in the human predicament.

Tony Hoagland is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Application for Release from the Dream and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two of his poems appeared recently in NER 38.3.

Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God can be purchased online.


Norman Lock’s fiction, The Wreckage of Eden, shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. ―NPR

From the Publisher: Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.

Norman Lock is an author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has honored with The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His fiction has appeared frequently in NER, most recently with “A Theory of the Self” in NER 34.2.

The Ensemble can be purchased directly from the publisher,  or from independent booksellers.


Well imagined, intricately plotted, and deeply felt, both humane and human. It unfurls like a peony: you keep thinking it can’t get any more perfect, and it does. A stunning feat. —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History and Koolaids: The Art of War

From the publisher: A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Harper’s, and Tin House, among others. Her story “The Briefcase” was featured in New England Review 29.2.

The Great Believers can be purchased directly from the publisher.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Bradley Bazzle, Bruce Bond, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Norman Lock, Rebecca Makkai, Tony Hoagland

New Books from NER Authors: April 2018

April 16, 2018

 

Brotherly love, a sense of displacement and lost time, and the deep care that reminds us of our humanity, form the heart of this book. These poems are a scavenger’s guide, a survivalist manifesto, a reminder of the way our daily experiences can fuel and forge our faith. A hauntingly beautiful and unusual debut.
—Dorianne Laux

From the publisher: Set against a landscape of rail yards and skate parks, Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut collection captures a spiritual journey of wanderlust, depression, brotherhood, and survival. These poems—a “verse novella” in documentary form—build momentum as they travel across the stark landscapes of the American West: hopping trains through dusty prairie towns, swapping stories with mystics and outlaws, skirting the edges of mountains and ridges, heading ever westward to find meaning in the remnants of a ruined Romantic ideal. Part cowboy poet, part prophet, Carlson-Wee finds beauty in the grit and kinship among strangers along the road.

Carlson-Wee’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, and Missouri Review, which selected a group of his poems for the 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize. He has received fellowships and awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fund. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco, and is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.

Rail can be purchased from BOA Editions.

 

I know this book changed me. The book itself knows change, how to change itself, knows so well how transformation—vast essential change which would seem to oppose a self—brings a person ever closer to their truth. —Brenda Shaughnessy

From the publisher: In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US-Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn—sometimes all at once.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States at age five through the mountains of Tijuana. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and is the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program. He cofounded Undocupoets, for which he was awarded the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in PBS NewsHour, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, and BuzzFeed, among others. He lives in California where he teaches at Sacramento State University.

Cenzontle can be purchased directly from the publisher, BOA Editions.

 

 

Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush . . . poems. Aphorisms . . . from another dimension.—The New York Times

From the publisher: Poetry. Asian American Studies. With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.

Nezhukumatathil has been widely celebrated for her lush imagination and all-embracing style. Preoccupied with earth science since childhood, Nezhukumatathil crafts her research-based poetry using curious phenomena of the natural world; realizing a vision of strangeness and beauty. Her full-length debut, Miracle Fruit, Poems, won the Tupelo press prize in 2003, followed by her Balcones prize-winning At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press, 2007). Her third collection, Lucky Fish (Tupelo Press, 2011), was the winner of a gold medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Independent Books. Her many other honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Nezhukumatathil serves as the poetry editor of Orion magazine. She teaches creative writing and environmental literature as a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she lives with her husband and sons.

Oceanic can be purchased online.

 

Poetry at full boil, poured with deliberate abandon. —David Orr, the New York Times’  Ten Favorite Poetry Books of the Year

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. An exceptional new work by a necessary voice.

Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including the Four Way Books title Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of many awards, he teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University, and lives in Houston.

How He Loved Them can be purchased online.

 

Melissa Stein’s sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority. —Mark Doty

From the publisher: In this lush, disturbing second collection from Melissa Stein, exquisite images are salvaged from harm and survival. Set against the natural world’s violence—both ordinary and sublime—pain shines jewel-like out of these poems, illuminating what lovers and families conceal. Stein uses her gifts for persona and lyric richness to build worlds that are vivid, intricate, tough, sexy, and raw: “over and over // life slapping you in the face / till you’re newly burnished / flat-out gasping and awake.” Breathless with risk and redemption, Terrible Blooms shows how loss claims us and what we reclaim.

Melissa Stein’s poetry collection Rough Honey won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, the Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won awards from Redivider, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She is a freelance editor in San Francisco.

Terrible Blooms can be purchased online.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Cenzontle, How He Loved Them, Kai Carlson-wee, Kevin Prufer, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Margaree Little, Melissa Stein, Oceanic, rail, rest, Terrible Blooms

NER Releases Short List for Emerging Writers Award

February 5, 2015

New England Review announces, with enormous pleasure, the finalists for the first New England Review Emerging Writers Award.

DSC_3006Please join us in congratulating our six finalists for 2015:

Leslie Bazzett  (34.3-4)
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo  (35.2)
William Fargason  (35.1)
Ricardo Nuila  (35.1)
Larry I. Palmer  (35.1)
Sean Warren  (35.2)

The winner, to be announced later this month, will receive a scholarship to the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Congratulations to them all—we are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in all three genres.

 

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Larry I. Palmer, Leslie Bazzett, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Ricardo Nuila, Sean Warren, William Fargason

New from Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in NER 35.2

August 22, 2014

Pulling the Moon | Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

 

 

I’ve never.
I’ve never made love.
I’ve never made love to a man.
I’ve never made love to a man but I imagine.
I imagine pulling the moon.
Pulling the moon out of his brow.
I imagine pulling 
the moon out of his brow and eating it again.

[read more]

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Pulling the Moon

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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