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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 from NER Authors: September 2017

September 30, 2017

Wesley Rothman’s pulsating debut Subwoofer is a collection of the needful songs we sing for each other. The poems are full of gorgeous and introspective exclamations made out of protest, out of rhymes, out of metronomes, oceans, and love. Each poem crackles with its own unexpected rhythms and the sum of all these exquisite sounds is a thoughtful exploration of spirituality and wonder.   —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

From the publisher: Subwoofer makes audible the deep bass of history, for this is a book of vibrant, honest listening: to the voices of Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Basquiat; to those without names; to the sadness of loss and the bitter silences within privilege and racism; to the luck of being alive. This book of witness, elegy, and renewal makes a noise that is joyful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.

Wesley Rothman’s work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Golden Shovel Anthology, among others. Recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, Rothman teaches in Washington, DC, while pursuing a doctorate in literature.

Subwoofer can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

℘

Vicious and haunting, luminescent and big-hearted, Alex McElroy’s writing burrows its way to the deep tissue of feeling and lodges there, determined. A gripping and nervy dissection of familial ties and the ambivalent bonds that structure our reality, Daddy Issues will leave you undone.
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

From the publisher: There are oil slicks in a patrilineal line—spaces in which paternal securities and filial affections lurch and loosen. So how does a daddy make do? In Alex McElroy’s collection Daddy Issues, daddies mourn their children; daddies absent themselves from their children; daddies take the shapes of celebrities to steal away the disguised wives of their children. Sometimes, daddies burn in a barn. Through an accumulation of gears, string, and brute pectoral muscle, McElroy brings these daddies back to life that we may see them as they are, in all their splendor and flop.

Alex McElroy’s writing appears in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and New England Review. He is the recipient of the 2016 Neutrino Prize from Passages North. His essay Endure was recently featured in NER 37.4 (Hear it read at NER Out Loud by Steven Medina.)

Daddy Issues can be purchased directly from its publisher The Cupboard.

℘

Weil showcases his narrative abilities in these offbeat and spirited stories . . .Weil’s stories have the scope and detours of longer work, and often seem to move on their own, following the protagonists’ unpredictable lives. The breadth of subject matter and styles is impressive, defying easy categorization and making the stories all the more memorable.―Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Following his debut Dayton Literary Peace Prize-winning novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history. Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.

Josh Weil is the author of The Great Glass Sea and The New Valley. A Fulbright Fellow and National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, he has been awarded The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a Pushcart. His essay “Liberation Square” appeared in NER 27.2.

The Age of Perpetual Light is published by Grove Press and can be found online.

℘

This Blessed Earth is a sort of universal story of family farmers and all they’re up against in their efforts to take care of the land and make a living from it. It’s also a crash course in the history that brought us to this place of corporate power, shrinking resources, and a changing climate. But it plants seeds of hope as the next generation prepares to inherit the family land and all the joys and challenges that come with it.—Willie Nelson, founder and president of Farm Aid

From the publisher: For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

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. His work has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 33.4.

This Blessed Earth can be purchased directly from its publisher Norton.

℘

Calvocoressi resists the limitations of language―especially where gender is concerned―to more fully capture the experience of a self “unlimited in its possibilities.” The setting of her third collection is woodsy, nocturnal, and by turns sinister and merciful; where “it did get dark” enough to see the stars “but how bright it was.” A range of characters compose a makeshift cast―or family―fluid enough to include a hermit, a cowboy, and a dowager. These poems balance wildness and control in a fearless treatment of eros, identity, trauma, and all that resists easy categorization.
—Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work by a space-age balladeer.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two previous collections. Her poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow in Poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been published on several occasions in the New England Review, most recently in NER 36.3.

Rocket Fantastic can be purchased online or from independent booksellers.

℘

The body becomes more than mystical in [Calling a Wolf a Wolf], as the boundaries between flesh and world are not merely blurred, but shattered—bodies are thrown upon all the sharp crooked edges of life and Akbar diligently records every detail of the aftermath. . . —Frontier Poetry

From the publisher: This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in the New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida. His poem “No Is A Complete Sentence” was recently published in NER 37.4.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf can be purchased online directly from its publisher Alice James.

 ℘

Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans.―Jamaal May

From the publisher: Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and “the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.”

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poem “Exiliados” was recently published in NER 38.1 .

Unaccompanied can be purchased online from its publisher, Copper Canyon Press.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: Alex McElroy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Javier Zamora, Josh Weil, Kaveh Akbar, Ted Genoways, Wesley Rothman


Vol. 43, No. 1

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Shelley Wong

Writer's Notebook—The Winter Forecast

Shelley Wong

In “The Winter Forecast,” the fashion runway becomes a hibernating place. As a California poet, I was thinking about winters elsewhere, the ones I first saw in children’s books and experienced when I lived in New York City in my twenties.

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