New England Review

Summer 2021

New Books by NER Authors

Three new titles from our NER authors mark the start of a prolific summer publication season!

Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women, recently returned with another explosive look into the interior lives of women. Animal (Avid Reader Press) is “a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society.” Her short story “Forty-Two” was published in NER 36.1, performed in NER Out Loud, and selected for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.

Novelist and poet Maria Hummel released her latest novel, Lesson In Red (Counterpoint Press), a provocative, noir thriller that “exposes dark questions about power and the art world and reveals the fatal mistakes that can befall those who threaten its status quo.” Maria Hummel contributions to NER include her poem “The First Turn Might Be the Right One Home” in NER 34.1, her story “No Others Before Me” in NER 31.2, and her poem “Keepers” in NER 27.3.

Rachel Hadas is a poet, translator, essayist, and author of more than twenty books throughout the span of her career. Her most recent release, Piece by Piece (Paul Dry Books), is a collection of selected prose that “sifts through the texts and experiences of her bookish life to pass on her findings to new readers.” Her work has appeared numerous times in NER, and her poem “Mysterious Microclimates” appears in the summer 2021 issue, NER 42.2.

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

New Books by NER Authors (July)

Over and over, the poems in Justin Bigos’s Mad River call on the Divine. But paying attention is also a kind of prayer, and Bigos’s poetry does just that by invoking the details of the world it asks us to inhabit. Whether in Texas, Pittsburgh, or Chicago, these poems shimmer.—C. Dale Young, author of The Halo 

“These are astonishing and unforgettable poems, poems of loneliness and mercy, of violence and grace. Justin Bigos has written here one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a very long time—monumental, memorial, and alive!” —Matt Hart, author of Radiant Action and Radiant Heart.

Justin Bigos is the author of a previous collection of poems, the chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (iO, 2014). His writing has appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Forklift Ohio, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The Best American Short Stories 2015. He cofounded and coedits the literary journal Waxwing and makes his home in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he teaches at Northern Arizona University. His poems “Three Rivers” and “Prayer After Refusing to Pray” appeared in NER 33.4. 

Mad River can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

Rachel Hadas’s new translation of the Iphigenia plays carves out its own space among recent translations of Euripides. None of them are quite so vivid, so contemporary, or (above all) so full of poetic interest. For those serious readers of poetry, Hadas’s translation will also stand out as constantly intriguing, inventive, and various.—John Talbot, author of Rough Translation: Poems

From the publisher: Poet and translator Rachel Hadas highlights the lyricism, emotion, and sheer humanity of Euripides’s plays. Mordant humor is here; so are heartbreak and tenderness. Hadas offers an Iphigenia story that resonates with our own troubled times and demonstrates anew the genius of one of the world’s supreme dramatists.

Rachel Hadas is a professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark, and is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations, including Questions in the Vestibule (Northwestern, 2016) and Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry. She is the editor (with Peter Constantine, Edmund Keeley, and Karen Van Dyck) of the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. Her work, both poetry and nonfiction, has appeared in many issues of NER to list, most recently in 36.1.

The Iphigenia Plays can be purchased at your local bookstore or directly from the publisher.

Hayes addresses this marvelous series of 70 free-verse sonnets to his potential assassin: a nameless, faceless embodiment of America’s penchant for racially motivated violence. The poems are redolent of his signature rhythmic artistry and wordplay . . . Inventive as ever, Hayes confronts America’s myriad ills with unflinching candor, while leaving space for love, humor, and hope. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered—the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award; Wind in a Box; Hip Logic; and Muscular Music, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2014 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowshop. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Several of his sonnets from this collection were published in NER 39.1.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin can be found at your local bookstore or online.

Hummel . . . presents a polished, droll, and provocative art-world thriller . . . With a cast of strong and complicated female characters, headed by a determined, reckless, funny, and imperiled amateur sleuth, Hummel crafts a shrewd and suspenseful inquiry into womanhood and the dark side of the art market, punctuated by striking variations on identity, portraiture, and “still lives.”—Booklist

“In this taut take on noir, misogyny, and the art of responsible storytelling, Hummel (Motherland, 2014, etc.) balances the glitz and glam of the Los Angeles art world with the town tourists don’t often see, from peeling, postwar bungalows to skid row tent cities and suffering junkies . . . This is a whip-smart mystery and a moving meditation on the consumption of female bodies all rolled into one.” —Kirkus Reviews

Maria Hummel is the author of the poetry collection House and Fire, winner of the 2013 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and two novels: Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and Wilderness Run (St. Martin’s, 2003). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry, Narrative, the Sun, the New York Times, and the centenary anthology The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. A Stegner Fellow, she taught at Stanford for nine years. She lives in Vermont with her husband and two sons, and teaches at the University of Vermont. Her short story “No Others Before Me” appeared in NER 31.2.

Still Lives can be purchased at your local bookstore or online.

Lisa Lewis writes of complex women as friends, mothers, sisters, “cat ladies,” dog walkers, and lovers. She writes with an astute awareness of class dynamics, the earth’s peril as a result of our violence, and our violent America—past and present. —Denise Duhamel

From the publisher: In Taxonomy of the Missing, Lisa Lewis’s sixth collection of poetry, the past is present, finely-detailed and filtered, but never diminished by, the kind of tender regret that accrues only after decades of lived experience.

Lisa Lewis‘s previous books include The Unbeliever (Brittingham Prize), Silent Treatment (National Poetry Series), Vivisect, Burned House with Swimming Pool (American Poetry Journal Prize), and The Body Double. A chapbook titled Story Box was also published as winner of the Poetry West Chapbook Contest. Lewis’s poem “Dry Hollows” appeared in NER 36.4.

Taxonomy of the Missing can be purchased directly from the publisher.


The Bible of Dirty Jokes is a bawdy and absorbing read—a madcap mystery about family secrets, small time stand-up comedy and big-time crimes. Visit the back alleys of the Borscht Belt and the underworld beyond with Eileen Pollack, one of our finest, and funniest, writers.—Claire Vaye Watkins

From the publisher: In The Bible of Dirty Jokes, Eileen Pollack (Breaking and Entering, A Perfect Life) brings to life the hilarious and moving history of Borscht Belt comedy, Catskills resorts, and the notorious Jewish mob, Murder Inc. In a novel that reads like a cross between The Sopranos and a Sarah Silverman special, Pollack bestows on American literature a protagonist for the ages, the wisecracking, starry-eyed, endlessly generous and forgiving Ketzel Weinrach.

Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction. In addition to The Bible of Dirty Jokes (Four Way Books 2018), Breaking and Entering (2012), she has published In The Mouth (2008), and is the recipient of various fellowships. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Best American series and elsewhere; she has been published by NER multiple times, most recently in 32.4. Pollack lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor, where she teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

The Bible of Dirty Jokes can be found at your local bookstore or online.

All the distinguishing characteristics we’ve come to associate with Elizabeth Spires’ poems—their shimmering clarity, verbal restraint, and self-interrogations—are enacted in this new work of meticulous surfaces and surprising depths… — Michael Waters, author of Celestial Joyride

From the publisher: In A Memory of the Future, Elizabeth Spires details the search for a core identity, meditating on the necessary divide between the social persona who navigates the world and the artist’s secret self. As the poems move from Zen reflections outward into the identifiable worlds of Manhattan and Maryland’s Eastern shore, houses, both real and imagined, become metaphorical extensions of the self and psyche.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of seven poetry collections, including Worldling and The Wave-Maker. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, among others. A professor at Goucher College, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry was featured in NER 35.1. 

A Memory of the Future can be purchased directly from the publisher.

 


C. Dale Young’s stories masterfully illuminate the moments in which regret and longing and grace powerfully collide—and transform the topography of a life. The Affliction is an exhilarating collection: I emerged deeply grateful for the existence of this book.—Laura van den Berg

From the publisher: Young writes of people who know what it is to be disappeared—desaparecidos—and of those who know what it is to have to hide. He renders the grueling, distorting effect of such disappearances on individuals and on those who know them in love or fear or wonder. The Affliction provides powerful testament to the notion of stories as resistance to loss. This is a book of necessary, clear-hearted affirmation in troubled times.

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016); The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018) is his first fiction collection. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Guernica, the Hopkins Review, Normal School, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares, as well as anthologies and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

The Affliction: A Novel in Stories can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

NER DIGITAL | A Sense in the World | Maria Hummel

 

http://themodern.org/sites/default/files/kiefer3_0.jpg#sthash.TagUBRyf.dpuf
Die Aschenblume Anselm Kiefer
Oil, emulsion, acrylic paint, clay, ash, earth, and dried sunflower on canvas
149 5/8 x 299 1/4 inches
Image courtesy of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

The day I first encountered Anselm Kiefer’s paintings, I was seven months pregnant with my first son. Because I am no longer that not-yet-mother, I can see her in my mind’s eye, wearing her mint green jacket, blond head tilted back, hand on her belly as she enters a gallery filled with massive, brooding landscapes. At first she doesn’t know where to look—all the canvasses are so arresting—and then one catches her eye and she drifts slowly over.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945, the year the Third Reich ended. He is nine years younger than my German father, who raced down to the basement shelter when his hometown was bombed by the Americans and emerged the next day to smashed streets and imminent surrender.

Kiefer’s paintings made windows of the museum walls, with dramatic views of a black, gold, battered-but-still-fertile earth. I remember the paintings as a collective, except for one giant gray canvas depicting a ceremonial hall. A sunflower hung upside down at its center, its blossom husk nearly touching the floor. The label read: Die Aschenblume. The Ash Flower. The hall was the Grand Mosaic Room in the former Third Reich Chancellery, painted and then smudged with ash.

As I stared into the gritty, cracked canvas, I felt a thrum of recognition. My father was a good man, raised by Mitläufer, Germans who went along with Naziism, reaping its benefits and later its consequences. My father witnessed his own father, a doctor, deployed to an army hospital in Weimar, then after the war, get stripped of his license to practice public medicine and sent to work on a logging crew. My father experienced his mother dying in the childbirth of his youngest brother in 1942, and lost all the fingers on his right hand in an accident in 1944. By the time Anselm Kiefer was born, my father was orphaned, permanently injured, and starving under the strict international aid laws of the reconstruction.

All my life I had weighed these facts against the Holocaust and come up empty.

I stared into Kiefer’s Ash Flower. The ruined interior, the dried flower-stalk hanging upside down—it was an arid scene, but it contained the residue of life and renewal.

“There is no history,” the artist said in a video outside the exhibition. He sat loosely before the camera, a shaved-headed, intense man with a quirk of humor about his mouth. His English was broken but emphatic. “[But] each human being tries to create a bigger context.” To create that context, you created an illusion that you stayed on the earth for a century and saw what unfolded. “This reassures you to find a sense in the world because there is no sense.”

Kiefer had borrowed his image from a Paul Celan poem, and now I would borrow it from him. I would seek my way by writing toward the Ash Flower and my own sense of it, my own meaning. The ash flower: the blossom of fire and dust over bombed Germany. The springtime end of the war, the Holocaust exposed, renewal and guilt and suffering spun together. The blighted innocence of children like Kiefer and my father.

My own son was born. I began writing a book. At first it was about my grandfather’s experiences at the Weimar hospital and his flight across war-torn Germany to reunite with his family. A year into the draft, my son fell acutely ill, and I realized the heart of the novel was elsewhere, mostly in the home, where the children were. It was watching a new mother try and fail to keep three boys safe and well as the Reich crumbled. Retreating armies and liberated concentration camps drifted offstage, and in their place rose intimate scenes of neighbors betraying neighbors, a baby struggling to walk in a cellar shelter.

The novel’s original title was The Ash Flower. I knew the title would change: I had entered my book through a doorway that Kiefer had made, but I would exit through my own. The travels of a novelist are always one way, and once-great vistas become postcards in a long, idiosyncratic journey. Yet Kiefer’s work will always possess, for me, a humbling and magnetic power. When I think back to the young woman I was, gazing at the upside-down sunflower, I realize how tall that bloom must have been, when it first grew upward from the earth. It would have towered over me.

Maria Hummel’s most recent contributions to NER include her poem, “The First Turn Might Be the Right One Home” in NER 34.1, and her story, “No Others Before Me” in NER 31.2. She is the author of Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and House and Fire, winner of the 2013 APR/Honickman Prize.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” is a bi-weekly series in which we present a writer’s encounter with a work of art such as a book, play, poem, film, painting, sculpture, or building.

 

New Books from NER Authors: Motherland by Maria Hummel

41-5fNSwrDL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Congratulations to NER author Maria Hummel, whose novel Motherland will be published in January by Counterpoint Press. Inspired by her grandfather’s wartime letters, Motherland depicts one family’s struggle through the waning months of World War II.

Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, writes, “Fear, grief and the will to survive fuse in this beautiful novel… Motherland occupies a relatively unexplored space in World War II literature, in which political sympathies and oppositions are vastly less important than finding enough tinder to keep the children warm… this book is a reminder of the reach of love, how it can blind, and how it can heal.”

Maria Hummel’s poetry and fiction have appeared numerous times in NER. You can find her most recent poem, “The First Turn Might Be the Right One Home,” in 34.1.

Motherland is available through Powell’s Books and other booksellers.

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