New England Review

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November 2021

New Books from NER Authors

November 22, 2021

Another month, another busy release schedule for our authors—and just in time for holiday wish lists! Here are eight new books from an accomplished assortment of New England Review poets, essayists, and short story writers.

The New Rivers Press publishes NER author Rosaleen Bertolino’s debut book, The Paper Demon and Other Stories. A collection of twelve stories, The Paper Demon counts among its subjects “runaways, witches, violent children, and shape-changing cats” as the book explores the interior insights, and mysteries, of love, death, family dynamics, and “meanness conscientiously displayed.” The manuscript won the 2019 Many Voices Project Prose competition. Bertolino’s fiction appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 38.3, and has been read at our NER Out Loud event. 

Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press) is the eleventh poetry collection from NER author and poet Marianne Boruch. Written following Boruch’s Fulbright sejour in Australia, the collection thematically engages the poetic ecology of human and environment to explore Pliny the Elder’s perennial question: Is the world finite? Boruch’s poems and short essays have made multiple appearances in the pages of NER, most recently in NER 42.1 and NER 39.1. 

Inventory of Doubts (Tupelo Press) is the latest collection from NER poet and artist Landon Godfrey. The winning manuscript of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, Inventory of Doubts juxtaposes anthropomorphic subjects in all arrangements with the book’s alphabetized structure. The influences of surrealism are not lost in this book, described as “thrilling” and full of “whimsy,” as Godfrey explores animal and object sentience. Godfrey’s poetry appeared in NER 38.3. 

NER founding editor, author, and poet Sydney Lea releases Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life with Green Writers Press. In this compendium of newspaper columns authored by Lea during his 2011-2015 tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate, Lea explores “how the making of a poet’s art resembles the making of any reader’s life.” Lea’s appearances in NER are numerous; his poetry was most recently included in NER 41.3. 

Author, Best American Poetry editor, and  NER poet David Lehman adds another poetry collection to his list of publications with this fall’s release of The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh Press). Meditating “on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age,” The Morning Line engages subjects with intelligence, intimacy, and inclusivity. Lehman’s poem “The Red Death” appeared in NER 27.4.

From Askold Melnyczuk comes The Man Who Would Not Bow and Other Stories (Grand Iota), a collection of eight stories spanning the New World and the Old. Melnyczuk’s fifth book, The Man Who Would Not Bow builds upon a subtly linked cast of characters, all grappling with their “angels and demons.” The title story appeared in NER 42.1.

NER author Julia Ridley Smith’s memoir, The Sum of Trifles, is out from the University of Georgia Press this November. Composed through a series of essays, the memoir pulls apart the layers of meaning to the objects her parents left behind. A remembrance and a dive into the material symbols of identity and purpose, The Sum of Trifles explores grief and things in both past and present. Smith’s essay “A Miniature for My Mother” appeared in NER 38.4.

Translator, author, and NER poet Carolyne Wright releases her sixth poetry collection, Masquerade, with Lost Horse Press. Rooted in places—Seattle and pre-Katrina New Orleans—and identities, Masquerade is “a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems” that reflects on finding place in aspiration, passion, and ideals despite the ever-present backdrop of American racism. Wright’s poem “A Reply to Storms in New Orleans” appeared in NER 21.4.


Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Askold Melnyczuk, Carolyne Wright, David Lehman, Julia Ridley Smith, Landon Godfrey, Marianne Boruch, Rosaleen Bertolino, Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea

Winner of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts

September 30, 2021

Founding Editor of New England Review and former Poet Laureate of Vermont, Sydney Lea is the the 2021 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the highest honor given to an artist by the state of Vermont.

Sydney Lea founded the New England Review in 1978, along with Jay Parini, and served as Editor until 1989. A poet, novelist, and professor, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Here, which was published in 2019 by Four Way Books.

Throughout his career he has been awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller fellowships. In 1998 Lea’s collection To The Bone: New and Selected Poems won the Poet’s Prize. In 2001, Lea was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts is reserved for artists who are both distinguished in their field and have had a profound impact on the state of Vermont.

The Governor’s Award for Excellence in The Arts will celebrate its awardees with a video tribute later this year. Read more about this year’s award recipients, given by the Vermont Arts Council.

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Governor's Award, Poet Laureate of Vermont, Sydney Lea

October 2020

New Books by NER Authors

October 27, 2020

Our authors have had a busy publication schedule this October! Some of their new books this month include include a mock-epic poem from Sydney Lea, a debut full-length poetry collection from Carlos Andrés Gómez, a series of personal essays from Peter LaSalle, a volume of poetry from Fiona Sze-Lorrain and a collection of essays from Michael Cohen.

Find them and more from the fall on the New England Review‘s new bookshelf at Bookshop.org.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Carlos Andrés Gómez, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Michael Cohen, Peter LaSalle, Sydney Lea

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Sydney Lea on Herbert Morris

June 11, 2018

NER 1.4 (1979)

Founding Editor Sydney Lea recalls discovering Herbert Morris’s poem “How to Improve Your Personality,” for NER 1.4 (1979).

The first issue of NER is an anthology of stars, including Robert Penn Warren, who, on seeing it, warned us that such anthologizing should not be our mission. My colleagues and I listened closely: this was, after all, Mr. Warren, about as distinguished a writer as the era knew, and a person, further, who had co-founded the Southern Review. We instantly ceased soliciting submissions and began relying instead on an open-door submissions policy.

The mission on which “Red” Warren had sent us involved a whole lot more work, but I soon learned that the real joy and the real service involved writers previously unknown to me—and in most cases unknown to much of the literary world. There were many such discoveries during those first years: we published the superb fictionist Charles Baxter well before he had a book in print; we anticipated Jorie Graham’s first collection by more than a year; we frequently featured the still first-rate and still under-known Robert Cording; we presented very early English translations of the wonderful Croatian short story writer, Antun Soljan.

And yet to this day there remains a poem that simply grabbed me and that has remained vivid in memory ever since, despite the sad death of its creator in 2001. The poem is Herbert Morris’s “How to Improve Your Personality,” which appeared in summer 1979, just prior to the release of his first book.

In those days, I had a less-than-scientific manner of knowing when I’d hit on something compelling; vague as it was, I know it served me better than any of the tools provided by my training for a PhD. I’d feel a sudden tingle at the very top of my then hair-covered head. When that happened, I knew I had something.

What can I say of “How to Improve Your Personality”? All manner of things were working on me as I first read the poem, and kept doing so as I reread it—just as they did when I reconsidered it this morning, thirty-eight years later. For instance, without my even registering as much, I was surely seduced by Morris’s easy command of the blank verse form. I also clearly observed a social-satiric dimension to the piece, a wry wit, but all that kept being undercut by the poet’s masterful evocation of dread, even doom.

There is also a pervading sense of mystery in the poem, evident right off:

When, in June, you are driven to those suburbs
Where the dark is just beginning to fall . . .

Who is this “you”? Who is driving him or her to which suburbs? Ordinarily such vagueness in a poem that is, after all, quasi-narrative would have put me off; but the obscurity of such details is utterly apt here and only adds to the overarching sense of things, and not especially pleasant ones, somehow closing in on this particular scene.

Herbert Morris, whom I met very briefly once when I was giving my own reading at Penn, went on to a very distinguished career as a poet, winning a Lannan Foundation award, among other distinctions. Though we published him any number of times, our paths never crossed again, which I deeply regret. I scarcely regret, though, that radiating tingle on my head as I pulled “How to Improve Your personality” out of the NER slush pile.

“How to Improve Your Personality” by Herbert Morris

BUY the BACK ISSUE (1.4)

**

Sydney Lea founded New England Review in 1978, with Jay Parini, and served as Editor until 1989. He was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015, during which time he visited 115 libraries around the state. He has published many collections of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection No Doubt the Nameless (Four Way Books, 2016) and the collection of lyrical essays What’s the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long (Green Writers Press, 2016). Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury Colleges. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, with his wife and founding NER Managing Editor, M. Robin Barone.

Filed Under: 40th Anniversary: From the Vault, NER Classics, News & Notes Tagged With: Herbert Morris, Sydney Lea

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Vol. 43, No. 2

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NER Digital

Corey Van Landingham

Behind the Byline

Corey Van Landingham

NER Managing Editor Leslie Sainz talks with poet Corey Van Landingham about urgency and liberation in persona poetry, the character of silence, and her two poems in NER 43.2.

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