New England Review

New Books from NER Authors: April 2018

 

Brotherly love, a sense of displacement and lost time, and the deep care that reminds us of our humanity, form the heart of this book. These poems are a scavenger’s guide, a survivalist manifesto, a reminder of the way our daily experiences can fuel and forge our faith. A hauntingly beautiful and unusual debut.
—Dorianne Laux

From the publisher: Set against a landscape of rail yards and skate parks, Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut collection captures a spiritual journey of wanderlust, depression, brotherhood, and survival. These poems—a “verse novella” in documentary form—build momentum as they travel across the stark landscapes of the American West: hopping trains through dusty prairie towns, swapping stories with mystics and outlaws, skirting the edges of mountains and ridges, heading ever westward to find meaning in the remnants of a ruined Romantic ideal. Part cowboy poet, part prophet, Carlson-Wee finds beauty in the grit and kinship among strangers along the road.

Carlson-Wee’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, and Missouri Review, which selected a group of his poems for the 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize. He has received fellowships and awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fund. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco, and is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.

Rail can be purchased from BOA Editions.

 

I know this book changed me. The book itself knows change, how to change itself, knows so well how transformation—vast essential change which would seem to oppose a self—brings a person ever closer to their truth. —Brenda Shaughnessy

From the publisher: In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US-Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn—sometimes all at once.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States at age five through the mountains of Tijuana. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and is the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program. He cofounded Undocupoets, for which he was awarded the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in PBS NewsHour, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, and BuzzFeed, among others. He lives in California where he teaches at Sacramento State University.

Cenzontle can be purchased directly from the publisher, BOA Editions.

 

 

Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush . . . poems. Aphorisms . . . from another dimension.—The New York Times

From the publisher: Poetry. Asian American Studies. With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.

Nezhukumatathil has been widely celebrated for her lush imagination and all-embracing style. Preoccupied with earth science since childhood, Nezhukumatathil crafts her research-based poetry using curious phenomena of the natural world; realizing a vision of strangeness and beauty. Her full-length debut, Miracle Fruit, Poems, won the Tupelo press prize in 2003, followed by her Balcones prize-winning At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press, 2007). Her third collection, Lucky Fish (Tupelo Press, 2011), was the winner of a gold medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Independent Books. Her many other honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Nezhukumatathil serves as the poetry editor of Orion magazine. She teaches creative writing and environmental literature as a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she lives with her husband and sons.

Oceanic can be purchased online.

 

Poetry at full boil, poured with deliberate abandon. —David Orr, the New York Times’  Ten Favorite Poetry Books of the Year

From the publisher: Kevin Prufer‘s How He Loved Them sets love in a fraught, paradoxical world where bombs explode, fields burn, and armies advance. With clear, compassionate eyes, Prufer finds powerful intimacy between fathers and sons, soldiers and civilians, the living and the (sometimes un)dead. An exceptional new work by a necessary voice.

Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including the Four Way Books title Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of many awards, he teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University, and lives in Houston.

How He Loved Them can be purchased online.

 

Melissa Stein’s sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority. —Mark Doty

From the publisher: In this lush, disturbing second collection from Melissa Stein, exquisite images are salvaged from harm and survival. Set against the natural world’s violence—both ordinary and sublime—pain shines jewel-like out of these poems, illuminating what lovers and families conceal. Stein uses her gifts for persona and lyric richness to build worlds that are vivid, intricate, tough, sexy, and raw: “over and over // life slapping you in the face / till you’re newly burnished / flat-out gasping and awake.” Breathless with risk and redemption, Terrible Blooms shows how loss claims us and what we reclaim.

Melissa Stein’s poetry collection Rough Honey won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, the Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won awards from Redivider, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She is a freelance editor in San Francisco.

Terrible Blooms can be purchased online.

New Books from NER Authors: March 2018

“What a gift Kazim Ali’s Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. ” —Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

From the publisher: Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress.

Kazim Ali is a poet, editor, and prose writer who teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, and Sky Ward, which won the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry.  His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. His poem “Origin Story” was published in NER 38.1.

Purchase Inquisition from Wesleyan University Press.

 

“Through the language of coding, mathematics, and musical notation, the characters in these stories analyze their worlds through ordered systems of logic that attempt to make sense of the inexplicability of grief and loss.” —Anne Valente

From the publisher: Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker’s sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person.

Matthew Baker is the author of the children’s novel If You Find This, a Booklist Top Ten Debut of 2015 and an Edgar Award Nominee for Best Juvenile Mystery. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, New England Review (“Sensei” in 35.4), Southern Review, Electric Literature, One Story, and elsewhere.

Hybrid Creatures can be purchased directly from the publisher, LSU Press.

 

 

 

“These whimsical, sincere, giddy-making stories are told with the imperative of a fabulist and the precision of a poet. Cadmium overlays syntax and character so that figures of speech and weird tropes of thought and language become solid, consequential and urgent.” —Andrew Tonkovich, Editor, Santa Monica Review

From the publisher: Michael Cadnum‘s Earthquake Murder is a collection of short fiction published in a variety anthologies and magazines in recent years and collected here for the first time. Featuring a foreword by radio and publishing force Andrew Tonkovick, these surprising, often ironic stories capture a world of danger and discovery.

Michael Cadnum is the author of thirty-five books, including the National Book Award Finalist The Book of the Lion, In a Dark Wood, Saint Peter’s Wolf, and Ghostwright. His story “Champion of the Ocean Floor” appeared in NER 20.4.

Earthquake Murder is available for purchase online.

 

 

“Sands Hall’s transcendent memoir, Flunk. Start., describes, with precise and utterly absorbing detail, her experience in the world of Scientology. But this is also astory that explores so many issues—how language is used to both illuminate and obscure, how we long for connection and meaning; it’s also a vivid portrait of how we find a place in our family and find a path through chaos. I could not put down this book—it is a triumph, a work of great honesty and insight. It is a necessary book for our time.” —Karen E. Bender, author of Refund

From the publisher: In Flunk. Start., Sands Hall chronicles her slow yet willing absorption into the Church of Scientology. Her time in the Church, the late 1970s, includes the secretive illness and death of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and the ascension of David Miscavige. Hall compellingly reveals what drew her into the religion—what she found intriguing and useful—and how she came to confront its darker sides.

Sands Hall is the author of the novel, Catching Heaven, a Willa Award Finalist for Best Contemporary Fiction, and a Random House Reader’s Circle selection; and of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. She teaches at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Community of Writers, Squaw Valley, and is a Teaching Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Hall lives in Nevada City.

Flunk. Start. can be purchased from Counterpoint Press.

 

“These bracing, vulnerable poems embody the central mystery of poetry: what is riven is made whole.” —James Longenbach

From the publisher: Rest is a vivid, powerful collection examining the human cost of crossing the border. In 2010, Margaree Little was working for a humanitarian mission near Tucson when, along with a group of volunteers, she found the unidentified dead body of a man, who a medical examiner would later estimate died at least six months before. This discovery serves as the jumping-off point to a stunning, elegiac series of poems commemorating an imagined, unknown life. Anchored by Little’s keen eye and unsparing self-reflection, this collection asks us to examine how a single life can affect so many others.

Margaree Little received her BA from Brown University and MFA from Warren Wilson College. The recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and various fellowships, scholarships and residencies, Little teaches creative writing at Kenyon College.

Rest can be purchased online at UPNE Book Partners.

 

 

“Accessible and engaging, Jay Parini’s The Way of Jesus is a cross between a memoir and a travel diary, except the landscape he is exploring is his own soul. The compelling spiritual narrative that results is informed by insight, personal reflection, and wide reading. In his own words, it is all about resurrection—now.” —The Right Reverend Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter

From the publisher: A follow-up to his 2013, Jesus: The Human Face of God, this new book is part spiritual autobiography and part intellectual journey, offering an account of what Parini calls “The Christian Mind” from the viewpoint of a liberal Christian. Throughout this intensely personal guide to living a spiritual and ethical life, he explores the question of what it really means to practice Christianity and draws extensively from readings in world literature and religions, offering synthesis of his five decades of scholarship on the topic.

Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College. His six books of poetry include New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015. He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H. M., and The Last Station, the last made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His biographical subjects include John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

The Way of Jesus can be purchased directly from the publisher, Beacon Press.

 

“There is no other contemporary voice quite like his, and I believe that, taken as a whole, Kevin Prufer’s prognostic backward gaze may someday prove to have shown us where we were going before we got there.” —Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review

From the publisher: Kevin Prufer‘s How He Loved Them sets love in a fraught, paradoxical world where bombs explode, fields burn, and armies advance. With clear, compassionate eyes, Prufer finds powerful intimacy between fathers and sons, soldiers and civilians, the living and the (sometimes un)dead.

Kevin Prufer is the author of six previous poetry collections including Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. He teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Lesley University. His poem “In the Wheat Field” appeared in NER 36.1.

How He Loved Them can be purchased from Four Way Books.

 

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