“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.
