New England Review

New Books by NER Authors

February 2020

Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties and In The Dream House.

From the publisher: While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.

And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life . . . The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe. Shapland is a former New England Review intern and graduate of Middlebury College.

My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers can be purchased from Tin House or your local independent bookstore.

[Bibbins’s] Ginsu wit and knack for outing the demons under our skin . . . becomes the perfect tableturning weapon against the culture of mass distraction. ―Boston Review

From the publisher: Mark Bibbins’s book-length poem sequence brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into new light—an account that approximates, with stunning lyricism, “what music sounds like / just before the record skips.” Addressed to a dead beloved, 13th Balloon troubles the cloud-like space of grief by piecing together the fragmented experiences of youth and loss, anguish and desire. Part elegy, part memoir in verse, this is a groundbreaking collection whose trajectory runs counter to the impulse toward nostalgia, unearthing what was thought to have burned in the fire.

Mark Bibbins is the author of three books with Copper Canyon including 13th Balloon; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, named one of the best poetry collections of 2014 by Publishers Weekly; and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, The New School, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003), and was a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. His work has appeared in NER 29.4 and  34.2.

13th Balloon can be purchased from Copper Canyon Press or at your local bookstore.

This fifth and most daring book yet sings deeply, solemn and vulnerable, a blues for our times. —Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest

From the publisher: In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.

Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism.

Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He has edited Best American Poetry 2019 and is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson lives Vermont where he is a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. Jackson read at NER‘s Vermont Reading Series in 2013.

The Absurd Man can be purchased from W. W. Norton or at your local bookstore.

Every poem seems made to steady and fortify him against mortality. —Dan Chiasson of the New Yorker

From the publisher: Survival is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought . . . one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

Christian Wiman is the author of two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (FSG, 2018); Every Riven Thing (FSG, 2010), winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry; Once in the West (FSG, 2014), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in poetry; and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in NER 21.1, 24.1, and 30.2.

Survival is a Style can be purchased from Macmillan or at your local bookstore.

New Books for April From NER Authors

Poetry, Literary Criticism, and
a Reconsideration of Europe’s Darkest Modern Days

41hGZqVGNKL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_“This book’s a little crazy . . . it’s also packed with truth.”

Mark Bibbins‘ new book of poetry, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, is out this month from Copper Canyon Press. His work has appeared in several issues of NER (“Arriving in Your New Country / Dilemma” in 29.4, and “Grief!” in 34.2).

Publisher’s Weekly: “Bibbin’s newest displays his caustic wit and probing insight admit an exhilarating range of cultural references.”

From NPR: “The book’s a little crazy, packed with air quotes and brackets, jokes and condemnations, forms that explode across the page. Crazily enough, it’s also packed with truth.”

Mark Bibbins  teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University. His most recent poetry collections are The Anxiety of Coincidence (Floating Wolf Quarterly Chapbooks, 2012), and The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon, 2009). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Best American Poetry, and more.

 

51qexzrdGML._SY344_BO1204203200_-200x300NER congratulates Marianne Boruch on the publication of her newest sequence of poems, Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press). Marianne’s work was first published in NER in 1994 (16.4) and her literary criticism “The End Inside It,” selected as a prose feature by Poetry Daily, appears in NER 33.2.

Marianne Boruch speaks to the Georgia Review about the project from which the poems emerged: “This thirty-page sequence of poems—“Cadaver, Speak”—grew out of a profoundly odd privilege given me in the fall of 2008 by Purdue University, where I’ve taught for twenty-three years. I was awarded the provost office’s “Faculty Fellowship in the Study of a Second Discipline” but, in fact, I had double luck. James Walker of the IU School of Medicine on Purdue’s campus allowed me to participate in his gross human anatomy course (the so-called “cadaver lab”), and Grace O’Brien—artist, and teacher of life drawing at Purdue—said yes, I could join her class, too.”

Marianne Boruch currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at Purdue University and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. Her most recent poetry collections are The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011) and Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan, 2008).

 

Frederick Brown Cover Photo“A brilliant reconsideration.”

Frederick Brown‘s biographical narrative, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914–1940 (Knopf), traces writers such as Maurice Barres and Charles Murras through France’s descent into instability after the first World War.

From the publisher: The Embrace of Unreason is “a brilliant reconsideration of the events and the political, social, and religious movements that led to France’s embrace of Fascism
and anti-Semitism . . . Brown masterfully brings to life Europe’s—and France’s—darkest modern years.”

Frederick Brown has been published in NER multiple times, most recently in NER 30.4 with Alexis de Toqueville’s Impressions of America: Three Letters, a translation from the French.

 

9780674430662_p0_v1_s260x420We congratulate Denis Donoghue, professor of English, Irish, and American Literatures at New York University, and NER contributor, on the publication of Metaphor (Harvard University Press). Reflected on every page of Metaphor are the accumulated wisdom of decades of reading and a sheer love of language and life. His literary criticism, “Yeats, Trying to Be Modern,” appears in NER 31.4.

Publisher’s Weekly: “In this prodigiously learned meditation, Donoghue takes readers through the history of the rhetorical device and its incarnation in poetry, fiction, philosophy, and everyday life.”

Denis Donoghue is a member of the International Association of University Professors of English and the Association of Literary Scholars and Teachers. He has published books on English, Irish, and American literature and the aesthetics and practices of reading. His recent books include Speaking of Beauty (Yale 2004), The American Classics (Yale 2005), and On Eloquence (Yale 2008).

Book can be purchased from Powell’s Books and independent booksellers. 

 

Grief! | By Mark Bibbins

800px-NYC_fire_escapesfrom the current issue (34.2):

Once I told someone
he should call his poem that
but I don’t know how
it turned out.
You could say Good
magazine or There’s a celebrity
on the fire escape
behind you,
and enough people
would still want to hear
the part about fire. I have
one enemy
but we don’t know it yet.
When we do we will meet up
at the balloon show
with a box of pins.

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