“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

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.