New England Review

New Books from NER Authors: December 2017

The aim of this anthology – so ably and passionately put together by the editors – is to try to shift the nature of the debate around guns and give voice to the effect of violence in a manner that isn’t always associated with the poetic. —Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award

From the publisher: Focused intensively on the crisis of gun violence in America, this volume brings together poems by dozens of our best-known poets, including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Natalie Diaz, Martín Espada, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman, Natasha Threthewey and Juan Felipe Herrera.

Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, Senator Christopher Murphy, Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston Emmanuel AME, and Virginia Tech shootings, and Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir, and Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis.

Bullets into Bells is edited by Brian Clements, Dean Rader, and Alexandra Teague. Teague’s poem “Cork” appeared in NER 24.1-2. It is available from Beacon Press and from independent booksellers.

 

This excellent, portable guide will appeal to travelers who want to write about their journeys effectively and engagingly. Its tools and techniques can help writers deepen observation, improve engagement, and enhance learning while on the move, and create rich work upon return. —Jordana Dym, editor of Mapping Latin America

From the publisher: Co-authored by Peter Chilson and Joanne B. Mulcahy, Writing Abroad is meant for travelers of all backgrounds and writing levels: a student embarking on overseas study; a retiree realizing a dream of seeing China; a Peace Corps worker in Kenya. All can benefit from documenting their adventures, whether on paper or online. Through practical advice and adaptable exercises, this guide will help travelers hone their observational skills, conduct research and interviews, choose an appropriate literary form, and incorporate photos and videos into their writing.

Peter Chilson is professor of creative writing and literature at Washington State University. He is the author of Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories, and We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. His essay “Welcome to Mali” appeared in NER 37.3.

Writing Abroad is available from the University of Chicago Press and from independent booksellers.

 

Writing at the advent of an uncertain age, Lavant continues to accompany us with her fierce interrogations – which will also endure long after us – in these elegant translations by David Chorlton. —Ellen Hinsey, author of Update on the Descent

From the David Chorlton’s introduction: Born in 1915 on July the fourth, Christine Thonhauser (Lavant) was the ninth child of a miner, Georg, and his wife, Anna, and grew up in poverty. While the poetry she was later to write contained the language of spirituality, the pain she described in it came from actual conditions which she suffered: scrofula and tuberculosis of the lungs. Being disadvantaged in health also meant she could not complete her education as intended. Unable to do hard physical work, she earned a living with knitting and weaving, until she gained a reputation as a writer. Along with these health problems, she had depression to endure. Poor hearing or blindness in her poetry were not conjured metaphors for general condition.

David Chorlton was born in Spittal-an-der-Drau, Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. As much as he has come to love the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, the setting for his work of fiction, The Taste of Fog (Rain Mountain Press, 2011). His most recent work includes Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson. His translation of a poem by Christine Lavant was included in NER 37.3.

Shatter the Bell in My Ear is available from The Bitter Oleander Press and from independent booksellers.

 

A darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power. —Kathy Fagan

From the publisher: With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown—be captured in language? “If one cannot see clearly,” Pankey writes, borrowing from Freud, “one at least wants / what is unclear to be in focus.”

Eric Pankey is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Augury and Crow-Work. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Pankey has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merril Foundation. A 1983 graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he is a professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and resides in Fairfax, Virginia. Pankey has been featured in NER numerous times, most recently appearing in NER 34.1.

Augury is available from Milkweed and from independent booksellers.

 

Chang is emerging as an exciting voice in contemporary poetry, and this is undoubtedly her most accomplished volume to date. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie – perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that “even silence is not silent.”

Victoria Chang’s fourth book of poems, Barbie Chang was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss was published by McSweeney’s and won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle.  She also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.  She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017.  She is a contributing editor of the literary journal Copper Nickel and a poetry editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Her work last appeared in New England Review in NER 38.3.

Barbie Chang is available from Copper Canyon Press and from independent booksellers.

 

“[Brimhall] allows us brief visions, glimpses, of experiences more lush and raw than our own.” —The Rumpus

From the publisher: Inspired by stories from her Brazilian-born mother, Traci Brimhall’s third collection—a lush and startling “autobiomythography”—is reminiscent of the rich imaginative worlds of Latin American magical realists. Set in the Brazilian Amazon, Saudade is one part ghost story, one part revival, and is populated by a colorful cast of characters and a recurring chorus of irreverent Marias.

Traci Brimhall is the author of two previous poetry collections. She earned her PhD from Western Michigan University and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas. Her work most recently appeared in New England Review NER 37.1.

Saudade is available from Copper Canyon Press and from independent booksellers.

 

Peter Chilson

Welcome to Mali

On Mali’s border with Niger, in the early hours of July 3, 1986, a policeman in blue studied the passport of a man in herdsman’s clothes: white turban, brown vest, and dust stained djellaba that fell to his ankles. Satisfied, the policeman picked up a wooden stamp and leaned on the handle with the palm of his hand to press the date into a blank page. He brushed his fingers over the cover, presenting it back to the traveler like a communion host, pinched between thumbs and forefingers. He had a pudgy, relaxed face and smiled when the traveler spoke to him in Tamashek, language of the Berber Tuaregs. This was my first visit to Mali. Waiting my turn, I watched and listened. The two men spoke a mix of French, which I knew, and Tamashek, which I didn’t. I heard the Tuareg say, “Je suis Tuareg” and the policeman’s reply: “Oui, nous sommes tous Africains. We are all Africans.” I think back now on that policeman checking the identity papers of an old Tuareg man and realize I had witnessed the makings of a civil war that would break Mali in half and threaten the western Sahel almost three decades later.

For a year I’d been teaching high school English in Niger—a country with many distinct ethnic groups and languages, fraught with tension between them—and never heard anyone utter words so sweeping and generous: “We are all Africans.” Maybe the policeman meant to dismiss the traveler’s ethnicity or maybe he was asking for understanding, as if to say: Look, my friend, I’m as unhappy about this border as you are, but it’s what we’ve got. We are all Africans. The policeman had to know the border insulted the Tuareg and Arab families waiting that night. Nomads despise borders. And yet, there we were, thirty people sitting on the ground beside a flat-nosed Daihatsu bus.

People spread themselves out on sand still wet from a monsoon rain, a sign that drought was ending. Men gathered their robes about them. Women cradled sleeping children. Teenagers slept on bare ground. This amazed me in the heat, mosquitos screaming about my ears. To the north lay that great gold patch of Sahara that maps show at the top of Africa. To the southwest, two hundred miles separated me from Timbuktu, where desert fades into the inland delta of the Niger River whose headwaters are another four hundred miles south in Guinea. There, old Mali began eight centuries ago and expanded, writes the historian Basil Davidson, to “the shores of the Atlantic . . . to the borders of modern Nigeria, and from the margin of the tropical forests northward into the Sahara.” In other words, from where I sat, in all directions spread the land that long ago was one of Africa’s great powers: The Empire of Mali.

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Peter Chilson teaches literature and writing at Washington State University. His essays, journalism, and fiction have appeared in American Scholar, Audubon, Ascent, High Country News, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Foreign Policy, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. In 2012 he went to Mali for Foreign Policy magazine to write about the civil war.

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