New England Review

New Books by NER Authors

Late-Summer Poetry Collections

“Corral nimbly bridges the personal and political, evoking themes of migration to ask what it means to be unwanted.”—New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy

From the publisher: Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?

Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He was a founding fellow of the CantoMundo Writers Conference, and recipient of a Whiting Award. He teaches at North Carolina State University. His poem “Watermark” appeared in NER 30.4. 

Guillotine can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Here is a particular heart and mind removing its shield in order to commune, to help us see the world again, more deeply and more strangely, and reader, I am grateful.”—Allison Benis White, author of The Wendy’s

From the publisher: Took House is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. In vulnerable poems of obsession, Camp places motivation deep in the background, following instead a chain reaction between pain and pleasure. Took House navigates a landscape of bone and ash, wine and circumstance. Boundaries shift between reality and allegory. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.

Lauren Camp is the author of five poetry collections. One Hundred Hungers, Camp’s third book, won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, Tupelo’s most prestigious poetry prize. Previous books have been shortlisted for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and the New Mexico- Arizona Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet ore, Slice, DIAGRAM and elsewhere, and many have been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish. Her poem “Winter of Tumult and Artifact” appeared in NER 36.4.

Took House can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“In prose so rapt with noticing you can almost believe the page remembers the tree it was. This is the poet’s final blessing: to hold the precious world in two good hands and say goodbye.”—Linda Gregerson, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and author of The Selvage

From the publisher:After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance—looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends—the relationships that sustained him throughout his life—as well as unflinching self-portraits.lending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly’s life.

Stanley Plumly (1939—2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Old Heart. He was also the author of four books of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes and The Immortal Evening, winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. His other honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018. His poetry has appeared in NER many times over the years, most recently in issue 40.1.

Middle Distance can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“Nezhukumatathil is the environmental writer we should be reading in schools, instead of Emerson or Thoreau.” ―The New Southern Fugitives

From the publisher: From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Read her poem “The Two” in NER 34.3-4. 

World of Wonders can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

NER Author Books—August 2018

Imagine yourself in an ideal classroom under the spell of an ideal teacher of poetry. That’s what it’s like to keep company with James Longenbach in the pages of How Poems Get Made. Gentle, learned, free-spirited, wide-ranging in taste, Longenbach roams from Anglo-Saxon poetry through the Renaissance to poets reinventing the art in English in our day. — Rosanna Warren

From the publisher: How Poems Get Made is a comprehensive guide to writing or reading poetry, by “one of our most lucid and important critics” (American Academy of Arts and Letters).

James Longenbach is the author of many other books of both poetry and literary criticism, including Earthling: Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, The Iron Key: Poems, The Art of the Poetic Line, and The Virtues of Poetry. Longenbach’s work is often published in the New Yorker and Paris Review, and his poems and essays have appeared in NER, most recently in NER 32.1. 

How Poems Get Made can be purchased at your local independent bookseller or online.

This is a gorgeous book, visually, conceptually, and in the delights of reading. Stanley Plumly . . . thinks as a poet, writes as a poet, with the sure-footedness of an informed scholar and on-site researcher. Constable and Turner would come back to life just to see themselves in Elegy Landscapes, and do so, virtually, in Plumly’s vivid illuminations.” — Susan J. Wolfson, professor of English, Princeton University

From the publisher: Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant”  nonfiction (Washington Post), explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner . . . Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapestakes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

Stanley Plumly has authored ten books of poetry and four works of nonfiction, including Elegy Landscapes, Posthumous Keats, and The Immortal Evening. Winner of the Truman Capote Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize, among others. Plumly’s essay Does Ripe Fruit Never Fall? appeared in NER 37.1, and his poetry appeared most recently in NER 37.3

Elegy Landscapes can be purchased at your local bookstore or online.

In this country, AIDS is no longer a quick death sentence. Jacques J. Rancourt, born the year AZT was released, makes visible its wreckage in the present. The plague years—queer bodies kissed by death and public scorn—shadow the speaker as he cruises, travels, and marries. Rancourt’s language is finely chiseled, attentive to the spiritual and the carnal. Each poem reminds us to live, to remember. —Eduardo C. Corral (author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize)

From the publisher: The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the inaugural title in our chapbook series is Jacques J. Rancourt‘s In the Time of PrEP. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017). He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. In addition to NER (32.4) and other journals, Rancourt’s poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in Best New Poets.  He lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In the Time of PrEP can be found at your local independent bookseller or online.

New Books by NER Authors

Against Sunset by Stanley PlumlyA powerful new volume from the National Book Award finalist that demonstrates how the lyric is essentially elegiac. —W.W. Norton & Company

Congratulations to NER author Stanley Plumly on his new book Against Sunset: Poems. As much an homage to the rich tradition of the Romantics as it is a meditation on memory itself, the poems live at the edges of disappearances.

Plumly is the author of many volumes of poetry, including Old Heart, the winner of 2007’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A finalist for the National Book Award, he is also the author of The Immortal Evening and Posthumous Keats. Stanley Plumly lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Plumly’s essay Does Ripe Fruit Never Fall? appeared in NER 37.1, and his poetry appeared most recently in NER 37.3.

Against Sunset: Poems will be available from W.W. Norton & Company on November 8th.

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imaginary vesselsCompelling, appealing, cinematic . . . Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world. —The Boston Globe

Paisley Rekdal celebrates the release of her newest book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, a Publishers Weekly “Most Anticipated Book” of Fall 2016. Through formally inventive lyrics and sonnet sequences, Rekdal’s bold new collection investigates how public identities and monuments become sites for our emotional re-enactments of history.

Rekdal is the author of an extensive body of work: a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography entitled Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and NER 34.3-4 with her poem When It Is Over It Will Be Over.

Imaginary Vessels is available from Copper Canyon Press and other booksellers.

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raa-smallFor anyone who loves the work of James Salter or William Trevor, Eugene Mirabelli is another writer to treasure, and Renato After Alba is one of the best books I’ve read in ages—a beautiful, profound and exhilarating novel about what sustains us in the face of inevitable loss. —Elizabeth Hand, author of Hard Light and Generation Loss

Ten years after the conclusion of Renato Stillamare’s defiant confessions in Renato, the Painter, Alba, Renato’s beloved wife of fifty years, dies without warning, and the blow leaves him in pieces. When Renato resumes his narrative, this larger-than-life artist has been reduced to a gray existence of messy confusion—broken belief, crazy hope, desperate philosophy. A man of fragments but still an artist, he assembles a collage of scenes of life with and without Alba, recollections of his eccentric Sicilian-American family, encounters with well-meaning friends, daily attempts at resuming his former life, and metaphysical railings against any deity capable of destroying what it has created.

Eugene Mirabelli is the author of eight previous novels, as well as numerous articles, reviews, short stories, and interviews. He has received a Rockefeller Foundation Award, was co-founder and co-director of the Alternative Literary Programs in the Schools, and is a professor emeritus of the State University of New York at Albany. An excerpt of his novel Renato After Alba appears in NER 37.1. It is available from McPherson & Co. and independent booksellers.

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Contradictions in the Design is a firehouse of a book—heaven-bent and relieved toward elemental mysteries that it resists and celebrates. Telegraphing the factories of Detroit, our familiar and strange American homes, the vast Blue Ridge, Olzmann guides us toward a hard-earned gratefulness that can exist when in the presence of impossible questions.   —Sarah Gambito

Olzmann‘s first book of poems, Mezzanines, received the 2011 Kundiman Prize (Alice James Books). He is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College. He has appeared in NER 35.3 and 30.4. Contradictions in the Design, Olzmann’s second collection of poetry, can be purchased from Alice James Books and other booksellers.

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Wayward Heroes brims with foreign names, Icelandic glyphs, and esoteric references that might otherwise distance readers from the story, but Roughton doesn’t allow any of it to get in the way: The beauty of Laxness’ gray, severe novel is rendered into the breed of elegant English that one might find in translations of The Iliad or Beowulf. It’s this excellent translation that allows Wayward Heroes to find relevance with contemporary readers and ring true — politically and socially — as it did in 1955 and medieval Iceland. —Taylor Kang, author of The Culture Trip

From the publisher: Published in 1952, Halldór Laxness’s Wayward Heroes can safely be said to be quite unlike any other work of modern literature. It is based on medieval Icelandic sagas—primarily the Saga of the Fosterbrothers and Snorri Sturluson’s treatment of the Norwegian saint-king Olaf Haraldsson— and is written in the style and language of those sagas. This reworking of Iceland’s ancient tales, set against a backdrop of the medieval Norse world, complete with Viking raids, battles enshrined in skaldic lays, saints’ cults, clashes between secular and spiritual authorities, journeys to faraway lands and abodes of trolls, legitimate claimants and pretenders to thrones, was written during the post-WWII buildup to the Cold War, and Laxness uses it as a vehicle for a critique of global militarism and belligerent national posturing that was as rampant then as now.

Philip Roughton was born in the US and lives in Iceland. His translation of Halldór Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell received the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2001 and second prize in the 2000 BCLA John Dryden Translation Competition. Excerpts from his translation of Wayward Heroes won the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2015 while his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for book-length literary translations in 2016. He was recently awarded an NEA Translation Grant for 2017. An excerpt of his translation of Laxness’s The Great Weaver from Kashmir appeared in NER 29.3.

Wayward Heroes is available from Archipelago Books and independent booksellers.

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sobbingschool9780143111863At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. . . . Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable. – Tracy K. Smith

Selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, The Sobbing School is NER author Joshua Bennett‘s “mesmerizing debut collection of poetry.” Deemed by Gloria as “an essential book for our times,” Bennett’s collection presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

Bennett’s titular poem “The Sobbing School” was published in NER 36.2, with other works published or forthcoming in Anti-, Blackbird, Callaloo, Obsidian, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University and has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and the Ford Foundation. He is winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prizes. Bennett is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

The Sobbing School is available now from Penguin Random House and independent booksellers.

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