New England Review

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
    • Vol. 43, No. 3 (2022)
    • Vol. 43, No. 2 (2022)
    • Vol. 43, No. 1 (2022)
    • Vol. 42, No. 4 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 3 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 2 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 1 (2021)
    • Vol. 41 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 3 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 2 (2020)
      • Black Lives Matter
      • Vol. 41, No.1 (2020)
    • Vol. 40 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 4 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 3 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 2 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No 1 (2019)
    • Vol. 39 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 4 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 3 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 1 (2018)
    • Vol. 38 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017)
      • Vol.38, No. 2 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017)
    • Vol. 37 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 3 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016)
    • Vol. 36 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 4 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 3 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 2 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 1 (2015)
    • Vol. 35 (2014-2015)
      • Vol. 35, No.1 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015)
    • Vol. 34 (2013-2014)
      • Vol. 34, No. 1 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)
    • Vol. 33 (2012-2013)
      • Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 4 (2013)
    • Vol. 32 (2011-2012)
      • Vol. 32, No. 1 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012)
    • Vol. 31 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 2 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010-2011)
    • Vol. 30 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009-2010)
    • Vol. 29 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008)
    • Vol. 28 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 1 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 4 (2007)
    • Vol. 27 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 4 (2006)
    • Vol. 26 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 2 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 4 (2005)
    • Vol. 25 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 3 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 4 (2004)
    • Vol. 24 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 2 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 4 (2004)
  • About
    • Masthead
    • NER Award Winners
    • Press
    • Award for Emerging Writers
    • Readers and Interns
    • Books by our authors
    • Contact
  • Audio
  • Events
  • Submit

NER Author Books Winter 2018

December 24, 2018

“Critiquing the commodification of black pain while also acknowledging and revealing your hurt as a black person is tricky as hell. It is dangerous. And that is precisely what Tiana Clark does in these beautiful, vulnerable, honest poems.”—Ross Gay

“If Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood were a blank book bearing that title alone, I would still feel I was in the presence of a profound lyric gift.”—Kaveh Akbar 

 I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press) is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.

Tiana Clark is also the author of Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, 2016 Academy of American Poets University Prize, and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Vanderbilt’s M.F.A. program where she served as the poetry editor of the Nashville Review. Clark’s poem “Ritual” appeared in NER 39.2.

I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood can be found at your local independent bookseller or online at Pitt Press.


“A clear eyed and unsentimental look at how farming has become relentlessly optimized by automation, markets and politics; factors that don’t always take into account the guy who’s actually driving the tractor.” — New York Times Book Review

From the publisher: The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, yet its future is in peril.  Ted Genoways explores this rapidly changing landscape of small, traditional farming operations, mapping as it unfolds day to day. This Blessed Earth is both a concise exploration of the history of the American small farm and a vivid, nuanced portrait of one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

Ted Genoways is an acclaimed journalist and author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. A contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard, he is the winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and is a two-time James Beard Foundation Award finalist. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his work has appeared multiple times in NER, most recently in 33.4.

This Blessed Earth can be found at your local bookstore or online at Norton.


“With anagrammatic swerve, Dora Malech stitches letters into lyric tapestries of cascading metamorphoses. The stunning final series reinvents a Plath poem: poiesis becoming as palpable as the dawning of crystals in dark matter.”—Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry
From the publisher: In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.

Dora Malech is the author of two previous books of poetry, Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and many other publications. She is assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore. Malech’s poem “As I Gather” was published in the 38.1 issue of NER.

Stet can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.


“[Trethewey’s poems] dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.” —James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress 

From the publisher: Layering joy and urgent defiance—against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone—Trethewey’s work gives pedestal and voice to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey’s first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet’s own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love.


“Bitsui’s poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry.” ―Library Journal

From the publisher: Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century’s most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.

Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. In addition to Dissolve, he is the author of the poetry collections Shapeshift (2003) and Flood Song (2009). Bitsui has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Poems from Dissolve were published in NER 39.1.

Dissolve can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.

Natasha Tretheway, two term U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and 2017 Heinz Award recipient, has written four collections of poetry and one book of nonfiction. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow, she is currently Board of Trustees professor of English at Northwestern University. She lives in Evanston, Illinois. Trethewey’s work has appeared in NER numerous times, as early as 20.2 and as recently as 35.3.

Monument can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.


From the publisher: 

TO WHOM IT CONCERNS, RE: World Wide Outage

In addition to the cover letter, enclosed please find the following materials.

1. Assets including but not limited to lakes, oceans, rivers, puddles, girls, and other assorted bodies of water, as well as a fine collection of second-hand clothes and tarnished costume jewelry (note: all assets are guaranteed to be in usable condition, if a little wet). 2. Liabilities including but not limited to insufficient funds, malfunctioning equipment, flood damage, and missing data. 3. Fifteen new poems by Elizabeth O’Brien investigating the value of vulnerability and the nature of inevitability in a gorgeous, irrepressible world on the verge of collapse.

Elizabeth O’Brien lives in Minneapolis, where she earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Minnesota and served as editor of dislocate. She is the recipient of a Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant through the Loft Literary Center, and the James Wright Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work—poetry and prose—has appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Rumpus, Tin House, Massachusetts Review, Best New Poets 2016, Ploughshares, AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle, and NER 35.3.

A Secret History of World Wide Outage can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.


“Masterful . . . . A penetrating, engrossing biography of a literary giant.” — Kirkus Reviews

“In this expansive biography, Safranski, a philosopher and historian, mixes narrative and commentary with the great poet’s own words, from celebrated verse to obscure correspondence. Safranski’s strength lies in his ability to blend artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings of various artists, thinkers, pietists, lovers, and plundering solders who shaped Goethe. His portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy.” — The New Yorker 

From the publisher: Rüdiger Safranski’s Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is the first definitive biography in a generation to tell the larger-than-life story of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Drawing upon the trove of letters, diaries, and notebooks Goethe left behind, as well as correspondence and criticism from Goethe’s contemporaries, Safranski weaves a rich tale of Europe in the throes of revolution and of the man whose ideas heralded a new era.

Rüdiger Safranski’s books in English include Nietzsche: A Political Biography (2001), Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1998), and Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (1990). His works have received numerous awards and have been translated into twenty-nine languages. Safranski’s essay “Wagner Overthrows the Gods” (translated by Robert E. Goodwin) appeared in NER 35.1.

Goethe: Life as a Work of Art can be found at your local independent bookseller or online at Norton.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Dora Melech, Elizabeth O'Brien, Natasha Tretheway, Rudiger Safranski, Sherwin Bitsui, Ted Genoways, Tiana Clark

New Books by NER Authors—October 2018

October 25, 2018

Kirstin Allio has written a novel full of indelible characters, wild scenes, incidental wisdom, and the best kinds of surprises. I fell entirely under the spell of her wonderful writing and of her outrageous, shameless guru; I would have followed him anywhere. —Margot Livesey, author, Mercury

From the publisher: Set on the coast of Maine and in the high desert of New Mexico, Buddhism for Western Children is a universal and timeless story of a boy who must escape subjugation, tell his story, and reclaim his soul. With spiraling, spellbinding language, Allio reveals a cast of vivid, often darkly funny characters, and propels us toward a shocking climax where Daniel’s story cracks open like a kaleidoscope, revealing the costs of submitting to a tyrant and the shimmering resilience of the human spirit.

Kirstin Allio is the author of Clothed, Female Figure and Garner, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for first fiction. Her honors include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and a PEN/O. Henry Prize. Her story “Green” appeared in NER 31.3. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Buddhism for Western Children can be found online or at your local independent bookstore.


“These poems live in the delicate space between the ordinary and the luminous. They are filledwith lived experience, sharp scene-setting, close observations, but their power comes from the tact of the rhythm and the diction, the flawless sense of tone.” —Colm Tóibín

From the publisher: Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop.

Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Almanac (Princeton), and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and NER 35.4. He teaches at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

Flyover Country can be found online or at your local independent bookstore.


“A creative portal into the life of the enigmantic, reclusive, modernist painter… Rivkin’s first book—impeccably researched, lavishly and lovingly written, insightful and discerning—is a joy to read.” –*STARRED* Kirkus Reviews

From the publisher: Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history — including his own. Upon first seeing Twombly’s remarkable paintings, author Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small – anything that might illuminate who Twombly really was. Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of interviews, Rivkin has reconstructed Twombly’s life, from his time at the legendary Black Mountain College to his canonization in a 1979 Whitney retrospective; from his heady explorations of Rome in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg to the ongoing efforts to shape his legacy after his death.

Including previously unpublished photographs, Chalk presents a more personal and searching type of biography than we’ve ever encountered, and brings to life a more complex Twombly than we’ve ever known.

Joshua Rivkin’s poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, the Southern Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets. A former Fulbright Scholar in Rome, Italy, as well as a Stegner Fellow in poetry, he has received awards from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Ucross Foundation. He teaches creative writing for Stanford’s Continuing Studies and lives in Salt Lake City. His work has appeared in NER Digital.

Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly can be found online or at your local independent bookstore.


“Bitsui’s poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry.” ―Library Journal

From the publisher: Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century’s most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.

Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. Bitsui has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was published in NER 39.1.

Dissolve can be found online or at your local independent bookseller.


“Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet―if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative.” ―Los Angeles Review of Books

From the publisher: Bob Hicok’s tenth collection of poetry, Hold, moves nimbly between childlike revelry and serious introspection. While confronting the rampant hypocrisies of the American collective unconscious, Hicok is guided by his deep and tender sense of whimsy and humility. Pointing to the natural world as a mirror through which to rediscover human beauty, he pauses to unapologetically celebrate the wonder of living at all.

Bob Hicok‘s books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a “Notable Book of the Year” by Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer, a computer system administrator, currently teaches at Purdue University. His poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and NER 39.2, 31.1, 29.2, and 27.1.

Hold can be found online or at your local independent bookstore.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: Austin Smith, Bob Hicok, Joshua Rivkin, Kirstin Allio, Sherwin Bitsui


Vol. 43, No. 4

Subscribe

NER Digital

Tomas Venclova

Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

Sign up for our newsletter

Click here to join our list and receive occasional news and always-great writing.

categories

Navigation

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Support NER
  • About
  • Advertising
  • Audio
  • Back Issues
  • Emerging Writers Award
  • Events
  • Podcast

ner via email

Stories, poems, essays, and web features delivered to your Inbox.

Categories

Copyright © 2023 · facebook · twitter

 

Loading Comments...