New England Review

Introducing NER 43.2

Summer 2022

Readers will find plenty of places to go in the summer issue of NER—now shipping from the printer—and like true travelers will find expectations upended and experiences that shift their ways of seeing.

Take a look inside our international feature on new writing from Lebanon, in which guest editor Marilyn Hacker gathers a polyglot and multinational range of writers, including poets Zeina Hashem Beck, lisa luxx, and Omar Sabbagh, and many new writers in translation, among them Taghrid Abdelal (trans. Fady Joudah) and Hilal Chouman (trans. Suneela Mubayi).

Or travel into the wilds of the imagination with new stories by David Ryan, Roy Kesey, and Kosiso Ugwueze and with poets Gillian Osborne, Corey Van Landingham, and Steven Duong—among many others. New essays by Maud Casey and Sarah Fawn Montgomery turn new lenses on #MeToo and climate doom, while Ben Miller and Marianne Boruch look at the origins of artistic experience.

And that’s just some of what you’ll find in NER 43.2. Take a look at the full table of contents to preview some of what’s on offer and order a copy for yourself, or subscribe, right here.

New & Recent Books from NER Authors & Staff

Winter 2021-2022

New reads for the New Year! Here are four new and recent books from New England Review authors to add to your to-be-read pile.

Not Yet Transfigured (Orison Books) is the latest poetry collection from Eric Pankey. Seeing itself becomes a metaphysical activity in these poems, whether the object in view is the unmediated natural world or a work of art. Concluding with a major new prose poem, “Landscape in Theory: A Meditation,” Not Yet Transfigured is an essential volume for every lover of contemporary poetry. Pankey’s poems have made multiple appearances in the pages of NER, most recently in NER 34.1.

During lockdown, poets Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr began writing Renga—a collaborative form of Japanese poetry—to each other, eventually building the collection A Different Distance, out now from Milkweed Editions. At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history. Their poem “Renga Summer 2020” appeared in NER 42.2.

The stories in Hisham Bustani’s The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (Mason Jar Press) explore the turbulent transformation in contemporary Arab societies. With a deft and poetic touch, Bustani examines the interpersonal with a global lens, connects the seemingly contradictory, and delves into the ways that international conflict can tear open the individuals that populate his world—all while pushing the narrative form into new and unexpected terrain. Bustani’s story “Packing for a Trip to the Sea,” appeared in NER 42.3.

NER Nonfiction and Drama Editor J.M. Tyree’s latest book, Wonder, Horror, Mystery (Punctum Books) is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical?

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Marilyn Hacker

An Introduction to Fifteen Contemporary British Poets

from NER 41.2
Buy the issue in print or as an ebook

Hacker brings fifteen contemporary British poets to the pages of NER 41.2, with an encore of poems online.

AT A MOMENT when we are drastically separated from one another, it is a small antidote to bring some writers and readers together. It has become paradoxical how little most American readers interested in poetry know about contemporary British poets, with a few exceptions (those whose publishers are well distributed publishers in the United States). It’s even more of a paradox when we remember how, once, many American poets looked to their British counterparts for inspiration/validation/exchange: Emily Dickinson sought out every new book by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and wrote an elegy when she died; Pound, Eliot, and H.D. made London the headquarters of their different modernist projects, Pound “discovering” British poets for Harriet Monroe at Poetry, and Eliot being consequential in a re-evaluation of the Metaphysical poets, making it more likely that American and British readers both would continue to read John Donne and George Herbert. Auden, of course, traveled in the other direction. And both Sylvia Plath’s achievement and her tragedy were enacted transatlantically.

Still, the understandable desire, the project, to create and define a poetry of and from the United States was so successful that, for many readers, in the United States and in non-anglophone countries, poetry in English today is poetry from the United States: not Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, India, Australia, Jamaica. The commercial vagaries of book and magazine distribution lead to insularity, even with a common language—to read a writer or a journal on the Internet, you need to know to look for them/it. As someone with a metaphorical foot in both the United States and Great Britain (while living in neither), I had the pleasure here of bringing together a group of British poets who might not yet be known to NER readers.

As always with an editorial venture, there are other poets whose work I’d like also to have included. The Internet (and a local bookshop!) will enable you to seek them out too. Some of them are Ishion Hutchinson, Patience Agbabe, Paul Farley, Mimi Khalvati, Kei Miller, Vahni Capildeo.

British poetry today is, like American poetry, more and more “hyphenated,” with important poets established and emerging of South Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean descent, as well as transfuges from elsewhere in Europe. Many important poets are also translators, with roots or connections with another language: e.g., Hungarian for George Szirtes and Russian for Sasha Dugdale and Carol Rumens, all three of whom are featured here. Every variety of linguistic experiment is practiced, from virtuoso work in the sonnet or terza rima (that can incorporate colloquial language and dialects) to polyglot dislocations (that can incorporate them too—as well as reaching back to earlier Englishes, as Caroline Bergvall did in books riffing on Chaucer). Landscape and cityscape are backdrop to narrative or a focus in themselves, and sometimes their consideration is also ekphrastic. None of this is radically different from American, or anglophone Canadian, poetry, but these are different poets, with different histories behind them, with bodies of work whose discovery enriched this (sometimes) American reader.

 Read the poems online or order a print copy today. 

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet, 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (Pleiades, 2020) and Emmanuel Moses’s Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award, and the Argana international poetry award from the Beit as-Sh’ir/House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

July 2020

New Books by NER Authors

Support independent bookstores from home by purchasing these new titles and others from bookshop.org or from your local bookstore.

“My life stopped for two days while I read this novel. The Brightest Place in the World accomplishes what only our best art attempts… This book is a love letter to Las Vegas, the western desert, and, most of all, the mysteries of the human heart.” —Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver

From the publisher: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below and associate professor of English at Creighton University.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in many publications, including the Yale Review, Ecotone, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and Folio. His story “First Sight” appeared in NER 29.2.

The Brightest Place in the World can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

Hitchcock Blonde is a kaleidoscope of comedy and sorrow, a deep dive into the ways popular culture informs innocence and experience. Original and unforgettable.—Stephen Kuusisto author of Have Dog, Will Travel

From the publisher: A heady cocktail of sex and trauma. . . . Imagine an episodic memoir that braids together insights about Alfred Hitchcock’s movies with the narrative of a woman’s life: scenes of growing up in Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies as the daughter of a schizophrenic mother and a traveling salesman father, adolescent sexual traumas, and adult botched marriages and relationships— all refracted through the lens of ten of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic movies.

In each chapter, the narrator—an award-winning poet—trains her idiosyncratic lens on a different film and then onto the uncanny connections they conjure up from her own life. 

Sharon Dolin is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Manual for Living and Whirlwind. Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry in 2008. She is Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press and she directs Writing about Art in Barcelona. Her translations of three Gemma Gorga poems appear in NER 37.1.

Hitchcock Blonde can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“There’s the great courage of tenderness and of hope here, and Marilyn Hacker has caught all her surprising phrasing, striking juxtapositions, and subtle syntactical legerdemain in an English that rings with the music of the original, not missing a beat, or an echo, or a bell.” —Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend

From the publisher: In this stunning addition to the Pleiades Press Translation Series, rendered in Marilyn Hacker’s innovative translation from the original French, Samira Negrouche confronts a war-torn Algeria, amidst the Arab Spring, cataloguing, in her luminary genre-bending poetry, grief, exile, and revolution. . . . These are imporant poems, and Hacker gives us the gift of reading them in English for the first time in a collected volume.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019),  and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015),  and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Other translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris. Read her forward to our Contemporary British Poets series in NER 41.2.

The Olive Trees’ Jazz can be purchased at Bookshop.org or at your local independent bookstore.

“[Hegi is] a writer at the height of her powers. I can’t think of a better way to ‘endorse’ a novel than to say I will be gifting it to my book-loving friends and family—a gift, mind you, not a loan, as I want this title in my keeper bookshelf.” —Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife

From the publisher: In the summer of 1878, the Ludwig Zirkus arrives on Nordstrand in Germany, to the delight of the island’s people. But after the show, a Hundred-Year Wave roars from the Nordsee and claims three young children. Three mothers are on the beach when it happens: Lotte, whose children are lost; Sabine, a Zirkus seamstress with her grown daughter; and Tilli, just a girl herself, who will give birth later that day at St. Margaret’s Home for Pregnant Girls. As full of joy and beauty as it is of pain, and told with the luminous power that has made Ursula Hegi a beloved bestselling author for decades, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls is a shining testament to the ways in which women hold each other up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Ursula Hegi is the author of over a dozen books, including Stones from the River, Children and Fire, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Tearing the Silence, and has received more than thirty grants and awards. She teaches in the Stony Brook MFA program and lives with her family on Long Island. Her essay “I’m Searching for a Home for Unwed Girls” on her experience writing The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls appeared in NER 36.3.

Hegi’s latest book can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Sadoff evokes complex philosophical ideas with a deceptive simplicity throughout. This is an accomplished addition to his impressive body of work.”—Publishers Weekly 

From the publisher: As a perennial outsider, the speaker traverses through loneliness, consumerism, and silence, until he sees his personal history as communal. It’s a quest to honor the complexity of the mind and heart over time―a quest for justice, love, and compassion. Cultural forces and conventions―repression, prejudice, power regimes― frame feelings of powerlessness, and are explored deeply in this collection.

Ira Sadoff is an award-winning and widely anthologized poet, critic, novelist and short story writer. He has taught at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He is currently the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. His work has appeared in NER ten times, as early as 1978 and most recently in NER 31.3.

Sadoff’s latest book can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

 

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