“Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
From the publisher: Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.
Paisley Rekdal is Utah’s Poet Laureate and the author of a book of essays, a hybrid photo-text memoir, and five books of poetry. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, and the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, and the Best American Poetry series. A regular NER contributor since 2005, Rekdal’s most recent NER publication, “The Erotic Wounds of War,” was featured in 39.4.
“Sze artfully matches style and content… Finely crafted and philosophical, this is a book that rewards multiple careful readings.” ―Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.
Arthur Sze is the author of Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009), Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005), and The Redshifting Web (Copper Canyon, 1998). He is the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His poem “Entanglement” was featured in NER 40.1.
From the publisher: For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani (trans. Alexander Booth) captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War—and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani’s novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of a first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy’s struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless a tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.
Alexander Booth is a writer and translator living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations were featured in NER 37.3.
You can purchase Love Write Large here from the publisher or from your local independent bookseller.
“In the tradition of Katherine Anne Porter, Parker’s exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier.”
—Publishers Weekly
From the publisher: Set in the hardscrabble landscape of early 1900s Oklahoma, but timeless in its sensibility, Prairie Fever traces the intense dynamic between the Stewart sisters: the pragmatic Lorena and the chimerical Elise. The two are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. That connection supersedes all else until the arrival of Gus McQueen. With honesty and poetic intensity and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, Michael Parker reminds us of the consequences of our choices. Expansive and intimate, this novel tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts.
Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. In addition to New England Review, his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, and other publications. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas. Read his O. Henry Prize winning story “Stop ‘n’ Go,” featured in NER 38.1.
Prairie Fever can be purchased online from the publisher here, or from your local independent bookseller.
Every day but Sunday he dresses in the uniform of his former profession: khaki-colored work clothes, steel-toed brogans, a thin windbreaker zipped to the Adam’s apple if there is a shadowy sweetness in the morning breeze. He rises before dawn, lights the pilot of the kerosene stove, lets the dogs out, careful not to slap the screen door. He sits at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee, black, for an hour until his wife rises and fries breakfast wordlessly in her housecoat. Neither of his sons wanted to take over the farm and his daughter moved up to Raleigh to work in a bank and he doesn’t understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to them, they begin in the middle and it’s never quite clear to him what it is they’re even advertising. He stands in the backyard looking out over the fields he leases now to an outfit out of, by God, Delaware, working a pick between his teeth, dogs at his feet. Maybe I have outlived time. Soon there will be no such thing as dew, the thing he once had to rouse himself early from bed to beat. Get it done before the sun burns the dew off. They’ll do away with that, too.