New England Review

Books by NER authors

October 2019

The Professor of Immortality is a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom. It’s also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest and most companionable novelists out there. —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

From the publisher: Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. In the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death, Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that her son might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him.

Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York; the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic; and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Pollack has published many times in NER, and her most recent contribution, “Ranch House,” can be found in NER 32.4.

The Professor of Immortality can be purchased through HarperCollins Publishers or from your local bookstore.

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

From the publisher: Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Betts has been published in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

Felon can be purchased directly from the publisher or from your local, independent bookstore.

Impressive in its precise articulation and range of insights, [Timothy] Donnelly’s dazzling third collection extends the thematic reach of his 2010 Kingsley Tufts Award–winning The Cloud Corporation. Charting the underbelly of Western capitalism, the speakers in Donnelly’s poems locate the imperialist impulse in humanity’s distant origins. From gut flora to galaxies, these poems offer glimpses “that waver like air above lit candles,” restoring meaning to the world in the process. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage point—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great. 

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family. His work appears in NER 40.1.

The Problem of the Many can be bought from Wave Books or from your local bookstore.

From the publisher: Through vivid imagery that celebrates the world, Boruch meditates on memory and time, and the process of living with, and working through, grief. Boruch’s poems challenge typical associations with the subject, exposing new facets of a universal feeling.

Marianne Boruch has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and often in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Boruch has published frequently in NER, most recently with the essay “In the Archives of the Humanly Possible: Two Rooms” in NER 37.1.

The Anti-Grief can be purchased through Copper Canyon Press or from an independent bookstore.

In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old. —The New York Times

From the publisher: In celebration of the prize’s centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Carl Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and has served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets since 2010. His own books of poetry include Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. He is a frequent contributor to NER, and his work appears most recently in NER 37.1.

Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets includes works by NER authors such as Maura Stanton, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholas Samaras, Richard Siken, Valerie Wohlfeld, Ellen Hinsey, Fady Joudah, Eduardo C. Corral, Noah Warren, and others. This anthology can be purchased from the publisher.

Awards and Honors for NER Authors

Congratulations to all of the NER authors who have recently been honored with awards and fellowships, including Owen McLeod, Penelope Cray, Mark Irwin, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tiana Clark, Charlie Clark, Geffrey Davis, Jenny Johnson, Sasha Pimentel, and Alison C. Rollins.

Owen McLeod’s poetry collection Dream Kitchen was awarded the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Judge Rosanna Warren said of the collection, “Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” The prize includes $1,000 and publication by The University of North Texas Press.
McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives; his poem “Uroboros,” was featured in NER 36.4.

Congratulations to Penelope Cray, whose short story collection Miracles Come on Mondays was selected as the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Judge Kazim Ali said of the collection, “These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. They are philosophical, funny, and frank. Like the fictions of Fanny Howe, Italo Calvino, and Rikki Ducornet, these stories rarely comfort. Then again, as one narrator observes, ‘When some alien sensation rises in the body, it unsettles rather than clarifies.’”
Cray holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home. Three of her pieces were featured in NER 36.4; read her story “Real and True” here, and listen to an oral performance of her story “The Red Painter,” delivered at NER Out Loud, here.

Frequent NER contributor and poet Mark Irwin was awarded the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry—an annual book contest sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at California State University, Fresno—for his collection Shimmer. The prize, named after the late poet Philip Levine who taught at Fresno State for many years and served as United States poet laureate from 2011-2012, includes a $2,000 prize and publication by Anhinga Press.
Irwin teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops in the Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California, and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Irwin has been a frequent contributor at NER since 1991; read his poem, “Three Panels,” featured in NER 22.1, here and check back in our 2019 summer issue for new poems from Shimmer.

A number of NER authors have been awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA Literature Fellowships program operates on a two-year cycle, alternating between prose and poetry fellowships, which offer $25,000 grants to published creative writers that enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. The 2019 NEA Creative Writing (Poetry) Fellowship recipients include:

Reginald Dwayne Betts (31.4, 34.1, 35.3)
Charlie Clark (38.4)
Tiana Clark (39.2)
Geffrey Davis (39.2)
Jenny Johnson (34.3-4)
Sasha Pimentel (36.4)
Alison C. Rollins (39.3)

Congratulations to all of the 2019 NEA Fellows!

NER Author Awards

Congratulations to all of our NER authors who have been recognized with awards so far this year, including Reginald Dwayne Betts, Thi Bui, Victoria Chang, Camille Dungy, Brad Felver, Rickey Laurentiis, James Longenbach, Valeria Luiselli, Molly Spencer, Brian Tierney, and Monica Youn. We are so proud of you and we continue to look forward to hearing about your next literary endeavors!

Brad Felver is the winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which is one of the most prestigious awards for a book-length collection of short stories or novellas. His manuscript, “The Dogs of Detroit,” is a collection of short stories, each of which focuses on grief and its many permutations, and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this year. Felver’s essay “City of Glass” can be found in NER 39.1

Three NER authors received awards from the Poetry Society of America. The Society gives awards for single poems, collections, and manuscripts, and each award has its own criteria.

Victoria Chang was awarded the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for her poetry collection, titled Obit. The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award is awarded to outstanding manuscripts-in-progress of poetry. A selection of poems from the collection can be found on the Foundation’s website here. Poems from Chang’s Obit also appeared in NER 38.3.

The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award has been given to Molly Spencer for her poem “Interior with a Woman Peeling Oranges, Snapping Beans.“ The award was created by Maury Medwick in honor of his wife Lucille, and is awarded for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme. Two of Spencer’s poems were published in NER 38.4.

Brian Tierney has been awarded the George Bogin Memorial Award. The Award was established by the family and friends of George Bogin for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. Tierney’s poem “All Stars Are Lights, Not All Lights Are Stars” is online on the Foundation’s website, and his poetry appears in NER 38.1.

Four NER Authors were named as finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The NBCC Award is awarded each March in six categories: fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, and criticism.

Thi Bui was a finalist in the autobiography category for her graphic novel The Best We Could Do, which explores her Vietnamese heritage and shares the stories of her parents’ lives. Bui’s illustrated memoir piece, “Blood and Rice,” appeared in NER 37.4.

Camille Dungy‘s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, made the finals list in the criticism category. Guidebook to Relative Strangers details Dungy’s experiences of traveling cross country with her young daughter, and interplay between others’ perceptions of them as mother-and-child and as black women. Dungy’s work can be found in NER 36.2.

Valeria Luiselli was also named a finalist in the criticism category. Her work Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions provides stark contrast between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children living in the US. Luiselli’s work “Stuttering Cities” (translated by Christina MacSweeney) appeared in the 35.1 issue of NER.

James Longenbach was named a finalist for poetry. His collection of poems, titled Earthling, blends the meditations of a modern-day “earthling” with many different perspectives, exploring what it means to be an inhabitant of Earth and how we confront our own mortality. Longenbach’s writing has been published multiple times by NER, most recently in 32.1.

Rickey Laurentiis has been awarded the prestigious Whiting Award for poetry. The Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, is based on early accomplishment and the promise of outstanding writing to come. Laurentiis’s debut book is titled Boy with Thorn: Poems, and his poem “Memory and Happiness” appeared in NER 36.2.

Two NER authors were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their poetry. Each year, roughly 175 Fellowships are awarded to individuals who demonstrate exceptional capabilities in productive scholarship, or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Monica Youn is the author of three books: Blackacre, Ignatz, and Barter. Her work has also been published in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Lana Turner, the Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her work appeared most recently in NER 37.1.

Reginald Dwayne Betts has published three collections of poetry: Near Burn and Burden: a collection of poems, Sahid Reads His Own Hand, and Bastards of the Reagan Era. His work can be found in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

And lastly, James Magruder‘s new musical Head Over Heels will be premiering on Broadway this month. The musical is an adaption of Sir Philip Sidney’s well known play Arcadia and features a mash-up of the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. His story story “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” appeared in NER 32.3.

New Books from NER Authors

31x688yc99L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Mesmerizing and beautiful in the language and rhythms of his pen. ―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

We congratulate NER contributor Reginald Dwayne Betts on the recent release of his poetic collection Bastards of the Reagan Era (Stahlecker Selections). His work appeared in NER 35.5.

Regniald Dwayne Bett’s Shahid Reads His Own Palm won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. He is a Yale Law student.

Bastards of the Reagan Era is available from independent booksellers.

♦

41Nam6YLaYL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period’s most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter . . . Dazzling. —David Wojahn, Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa

We are also pleased to announce Komunyakaa‘s collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. He teaches at New York University.

The Emperor of Water Clocks is available from independent booksellers.

♦

51cX2y5gkLL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy.—Publishers Weekly

NER is pleased to announce the publication of Linda Gregerson‘s first book of collected work, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books). Gregerson’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently NER 31.4.

Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.

Prodigal is available from independent booksellers.

♦

513YIrt8CZL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_Shards of elegy, lament, intermittent flashes of wit, a philosophical sensuality throughout: this is subtle, sophisticated, gorgeous, and unsettling work by a poet open to being ‘torn by the lyric’ as well as history. Sze-Lorrain aims ‘to honor / the invisible,’ ‘to get silence right’: she does. —Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets

Fiona Sze-Lorrain‘s The Ruined Elegance: Poems has been published by Princeton University Press. Her work appears in NER 35.2.

Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell, writes of Ruined Elegance: “The luminous art of Sze-Lorrain reveals how imaginative vision requires the veil. Hers is a contemporary, polycultural poetry, a language of distance and silence, rich with suggestion. The disparate, brilliant images of her Ruined Elegance fend off narrative, ‘torn by the lyric,’ whose instrument is more enduring than its players: its ‘strings stayed taut. None / broke. Her fingernails did.'”

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist. The author of two previous books of poetry in English, My Funeral Gondola and Water the Moon, she also writes and translates in French and Chinese. She lives in Paris.

The Ruined Elegance: Poems is available from Princeton University Press and independent booksellers.

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5159SYcAF2L._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_Whether in praise songs, appraisals, or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace . . . The result is an extraordinary and ultimately irreducible debut. —Terrance Hayes, judge

Rickey Laurentiis has released his latest collection, Boy with Thorn, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Laurentiis’s work appeared in NER‘S Volume 36.2.

Laurentiis, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Boy with Thorn is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press and independent booksellers.

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A superbly personal biography that pulsates with intelligence, scholarship, and heart. —Kirkus Review

NER is pleased to announce that founding editor Jay Parini’s Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 3.44.34 PMEmpire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal was recently published with Doubleday Books. Parini’s work, including “An Interview with Gore Vidal” (NER 14.1), has appeared in multiple NER issues.

Parini has published over two dozen books, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Last Station, Robert Frost: A Life, and The Apprentice Lover. He is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. He has received honorary degrees from Lafayette College and the University of Scranton. Currently, Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College.

Parini’s access to Vidal and his thoughtful reflections on him establish this as the definitive biography of a major writer. — Publisher’s Weekly. 

Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal is available from Doubleday Books and independent booksellers.

 

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