New England Review

New Books from NER Authors

April 2022

Happy National Poetry Month! We’re celebrating with five new poetry collections by NER authors (and maybe some captivating prose, too!)

By tapping into the metaphysical, the ekphrastic, the sensual, and the ordinary moments of life, Erika Meitner’s newest collection Useful Junk (BOA Editions) provides a stunning exploration of memory, passion, desire, and intimacy. These poems assert that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, reminding us that deeply-rooted desires are what keep us alive and moving forward in a damaged world. Meitner’s poem “In the Waiting Room of America” appeared in NER 38.4.

In his highly anticipated second poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Random House), Ocean Vuong reckons with grief, the meaning of family, and “the cost of being the product of an American war in America.” Deeply intimate and tender, Time is a Mother embraces the nuances of healing and illuminates a means of survival: “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” Vuong’s poem “To My Father / To My Unborn Son” appeared in NER 36.1.

Written between 2016 and 2020, Dana Levin’s fifth collection, Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press) carries a reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. Formally varied with prosaic breadth, Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out “to be a messenger—to record whatever wanted to stream through.” Levin’s poetry has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 42.2.

Largely composed in Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” Victoria Chang explores loss and redemption in her newest poetry collection, The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press). Chang contrasts these traditional forms with contemporary language, reconciling the loss of her mother, the ache of wanting, and “our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.” Chang’s poetry has appeared in several issues of NER, most recently in issue 41.3.

Rachel Mannheimer explores the intersection of art and love in her book-length narrative poem, Earth Room (Changes). Selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as the winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Earth Room transports the reader across decades and different landscapes, considering art through “observations shaped by gender and environment, history, and portents of apocalypse.” Mannheimer’s poems “Horses” and “Berlin” appeared in NER 42.4.

A young woman in Kamalpur high society must confront the alcoholism of her mother and change her own hard-partying ways in Naheed Phiroze Patel’s Mirror Made of Rain (Unnamed). Patel’s story explores class and traditions in contemporary India in this exhilarating commentary on family, gender, and addiction. Mirror Made of Rain challenges its reader to contend with how society alters the way we view ourselves. Patel’s short story “Call of the Greater Coucal” appeared in NER 39.3.

Britain’s leading military historian, Richard Overy, reassesses World War II in Blood and Ruins (Viking). Overy argues for a more global perspective on WWII that broadens its focus to consider a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, the bitter cost for soldiers, and the heightened level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its aftermath. Overy’s investigation “The Summer Ends, The War Begins” appeared in NER 31.2.

Joseph Pearson’s My Grandfather’s Knife (HarperCollins Canada) catalogues forgotten stories from World War II through the lens of personal artifacts. These everyday objects—a knife, a diary, a recipe book, a stringed instrument, and a cotton pouch—reveal the histories of their young owners, and illuminate the often dark history of the 20th century. Pearson’s nonfiction piece “This is Also Tangier” appeared in NER 39.1.

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

Fall 2021: October Poetry Feature

New Books from NER Authors

The leaves outside are turning and gravity is covering our sidewalks in chestnuts and apples (Sir Isaac Newton would be smiling). With cooler weather on its way, we recommend grabbing a cup of tea and enjoying a title or two from these New England Review authors and translators.

Poet Jeffrey Franklin releases his second collection, Where We Lay Down (Kelsay Books). A “multifarious and expansive collection,” the book is split thematically into six explorations: Fathers and Sons, Making Love, Making War, Homing, Totem Animals, and Full Emptiness. Influenced by Franklin’s own interests in religion and spirituality, Where We Lay Down delves into human conditions around maturation and reflection. Franklin’s poem, “To a Student Who Reads ‘The Second Coming’ As Sexual Autobiography,” appeared in NER 22.3.

Machete (Knopf), the third collection from poet Tomás Q Morín, is released this month. Described as a “lyrical, dynamic, insightful collection, at once delicate and fierce, touching on climate, family, racism, growth, and life itself,” Machete explores suffering and its intersections with reactions of both anger and laughter. Morín’s poems have previously appeared in NER 35.3, NER 33.2, and NER 32.2; his piece “A Renaissance Mule” was published as an NER Digital in 2012. 

Jane Wong publishes her sophomore collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Anything (Alice James Books). Composed around central themes of migration and loss, grief and alienation, How to Not Be Afraid of Anything grapples with immigrant identities as made relational to histories past and present. Wong’s poem “I Haul a House Out of the Bay” was published in NER 39.4. 

My Wilderness: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press) is the latest collection from poet Maxine Scates. Traversing the emotional landscapes of motherhood and memory through explorations of loss and empathy, My Wilderness “is a grave and beautiful archive of losses.” The book’s title poem, “My Wilderness,” appeared in NER 37.2. 

Poet and writer Victoria Chang publishes Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief with Milkweed Editions. Despite not being labelled explicitly as a poetry collection, Dear Memory encapsulates the “process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry,” as Chang explores themes of immigrant identity, history, grief, and knowledge of the self through family relics and letters. Chang’s poetry has appeared in numerous issues since 2002, most recently NER 41.3 and NER 38.3. 

Yu Xiuhua’s Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays (Astra House) is released in English through collaboration with poet and NER translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Thematically organized around love and writing, on mortality, the natural world, and nostalgia, the collection’s poems and essays are “in conversation with each other,” as Yu utilizes the written form to grapple with family, home, and “the reality of disability in the context of a body’s urges and desires.” Sze-Lorrain’s translations have appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 36.2.

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

Behind the Byline

Victoria Chang

Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence.

Photo credit: Margaret Molloy

Victoria Chang, author of the “Marfa, Texas” (NER 41.4) and “Obit” series (NER 38.3) talks to NER reader Sabrina Islam about meditations on loss and grief, and on finally writing her truth: “I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.”

Sabrina Islam: Your meditation on loss and grief in Obit is incredible. In “Grief” you write, “A picture of / oblivion is not the same as oblivion. / My grief is not the same as my pain. My / mother was a mathematician so I tried / to calculate my grief. My father was an / engineer so I tried to build a box around / my grief, along with a small wooden / bed that grief could lie down on. The / texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing / me to speak about nothing.” How has grief become an obsession for you and what particular value is present in thinking and writing about the subject of grief?

Victoria Chang: I think why write about anything really? Why write at all? I don’t think we can choose to be writers. I also don’t think we can choose what we write about, at least for some things. Obviously, you can be given assignments or prompts, but even then, our own obsessions seem to creep out. Grief just is. We can’t choose when someone dies (or when we die ourselves), but those left behind grieve. As a writer, I write from deep wells of thinking and feeling, like most writers probably.

SI: Grief continues. In the newer series, “Marfa, Texas,” you write, “Is it // possible to stop loving / everything? The owl. The / hawk. Every person I meet. To / see everyone as my mother. To / have a heart // like this is to be made of / midnight.” You’ve poured your grief into Obit, then into “Marfa, Texas.” Do the poems ever speak back to you? How is your grief evolving and changing you?

VC: Poems always speak to us! Most of the time, we don’t listen very well. Writing, but mostly revising feels a lot like listening to the poems. Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because sometimes whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence. It’s ignoring me for a reason. Usually that means to let it sit or go read something else in a different genre or something entirely different. But given my stubborn personality, I usually just keep reading a manuscript again and again and even if I change one word, I think of it as a miracle and thank my manuscript. Right now, I’m reading academic articles. Sometimes I read philosophy. I actually enjoy reading literary criticism textbooks. I don’t watch movies but I love reading movie criticism.

SI: Your words become increasingly charged and powerful in the sequence “Marfa, Texas.” The last poem in the series ends, “To love so much is to live / within birds. // I have been waiting for / this heart to fade or at / least to kneel. Maybe the / heart is not inside me but I / am inside it.” You frequently write sequences: why are you drawn to this form?

VC: I think the obsessive person can be drawn into sequences. It’s the form of relentless pursuit. The trouble is that there’s always a gap so the obsessive person is running on a treadmill within that gap. I like to call that gap the gap of estrangement. That’s where I reside. That’s my address. I used to make apologies for being so obsessive, but now I just embrace that disposition and personality. My father was/is a lot like this. It feels chemical in the brain actually. I also think obsessiveness has something to do with immigration, estrangement from a country and white supremacist institutions. The chasing is a part of obsession because the gap of estrangement can never be filled. I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.

SI: Circles often appear in your poetry collections. In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” How does the form of a circle stimulate your thinking process?

VC: As sloppy a person as I am, I am always surprised at how I can make patterns, see patterns, or think in patterns. My brain often feels like a pinball machine. But then I can be exceptionally organized and linear when necessary. I love how malleable and unfixed the brain is/can be. It’s important (to me at least) not to stereotype myself, if that makes sense. We’re all multitudinous. We are exceptionally flexible. My attitude has always been “why not?” and this has gotten me into all sorts of trouble in the past, but in art-making at least, I would say it is my governing principle (if I even have one consciously). Experimentation is very important to me as a person, trying new things, the new, the fresh.

SI: Your new book Love, Love is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse about a girl who slowly solves the mystery of her sister’s strange illness, which we learn is trichotillomania. The protagonist, Frances, is also dealing with bullying and grappling with her developing identity. Growing up in an immigrant Chinese American family, why was it important for you to write this story?

VC: I’ve tried to write that story so many times (and just wrote another essay on this material). Sometimes we are at the center of our own narratives. Other times, we are not main characters. In my sister’s struggles, I was not the protagonist but a side character. I have begun to recognize that this doesn’t mean I wasn’t impacted (or implicated) by our family’s trauma surrounding this mysterious illness. There are a lot of unspoken traumas in our family, mostly centered around my mother, that only now, after she has passed, can I even properly or adequately reflect on. I have a whole book exploring these things that I am working hard on at this very moment. As an immigrant’s child, there’s also a reckoning with my parents’ trauma and my mother’s trauma and I am writing about all of this now.

SI: Realist painter Edward Hopper’s work prominently features in your earlier collection The Boss, which explores, among other things, American corporate life and power structures. How does visual art inspire poetry for you?

VC: I am very interested in visual art, the visual, aesthetics. How things look matters to me a lot. I am very interested in design, architecture, sculpture. I think this is pretty common amongst poets who spend a lot of time “seeing” things in their minds and in real life. I am working on some visual elements for a new book right now as well. If I could be any other kind of artist, I would be a visual artist. I took a lot of art classes growing up, but then somewhere along the way, switched over more to writing.

SI: Which poets and writers have shaped your understanding of language and poetry?

VC: So many! Too many to name here. Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Bishop. Tranströmer, Glück, Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Plath of course, Eliot, Stevens, Lee. So many contemporary poets and writers I admire too. I could list them here, but I fear I would leave too many people out. We are in a rich time of poetry.

SI: In your poem “Instinct” you ask, “What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, / even their own?” Writing about war and genocide, your work often wrestles with the truly vile parts of human history. In “Ode to Iris Chang” you consider, “How // to trust humans. // How to trust the earth / when all that is there is a // derivative of mud.” What motivates you as a writer to continually return to the page and still explore humanity?

VC: As a writer, I’ve always tried to honor my own truth, whether that truth went against the grain or with the grain. I can’t and won’t be anyone else. I used to feel a lot of shame for not being like other people, but now I try harder to write what feels true to me. I used to think I was supposed to sound like other writers, but I think perhaps starting with my third book, I gave up on that. I just began to write what rang true to me instead of trying to be like everyone else. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened. I think I grew up a little bit (finally). This doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback, though. I listen really closely to feedback from close friends who are kind enough to read my work. Sometimes, depending on what I’m working on, I need more feedback than other times. I think a writer needs many things, but persistence and a doggedness are two qualities that can be important. If I didn’t have these qualities, I don’t think I would have been able to survive the brutal literary world. I also think a writer needs to simply love writing. I do and always have. If I have nothing else, I know that I really like writing. As I get older and older, I am less afraid of writing about those harder things. The fear, though, is usually how others will perceive the writing or me. At some point, I have just accepted that poets in particular can be very harsh and judgmental. They won’t like hardly anything anyone writes anyway, so why bother trying to please them? I am more interested in pleasing myself.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Victoria.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

 

NER Author Awards

Congratulations to all of our NER authors who have been recognized with awards so far this year, including Reginald Dwayne Betts, Thi Bui, Victoria Chang, Camille Dungy, Brad Felver, Rickey Laurentiis, James Longenbach, Valeria Luiselli, Molly Spencer, Brian Tierney, and Monica Youn. We are so proud of you and we continue to look forward to hearing about your next literary endeavors!

Brad Felver is the winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which is one of the most prestigious awards for a book-length collection of short stories or novellas. His manuscript, “The Dogs of Detroit,” is a collection of short stories, each of which focuses on grief and its many permutations, and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this year. Felver’s essay “City of Glass” can be found in NER 39.1

Three NER authors received awards from the Poetry Society of America. The Society gives awards for single poems, collections, and manuscripts, and each award has its own criteria.

Victoria Chang was awarded the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for her poetry collection, titled Obit. The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award is awarded to outstanding manuscripts-in-progress of poetry. A selection of poems from the collection can be found on the Foundation’s website here. Poems from Chang’s Obit also appeared in NER 38.3.

The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award has been given to Molly Spencer for her poem “Interior with a Woman Peeling Oranges, Snapping Beans.“ The award was created by Maury Medwick in honor of his wife Lucille, and is awarded for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme. Two of Spencer’s poems were published in NER 38.4.

Brian Tierney has been awarded the George Bogin Memorial Award. The Award was established by the family and friends of George Bogin for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. Tierney’s poem “All Stars Are Lights, Not All Lights Are Stars” is online on the Foundation’s website, and his poetry appears in NER 38.1.

Four NER Authors were named as finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The NBCC Award is awarded each March in six categories: fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, and criticism.

Thi Bui was a finalist in the autobiography category for her graphic novel The Best We Could Do, which explores her Vietnamese heritage and shares the stories of her parents’ lives. Bui’s illustrated memoir piece, “Blood and Rice,” appeared in NER 37.4.

Camille Dungy‘s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, made the finals list in the criticism category. Guidebook to Relative Strangers details Dungy’s experiences of traveling cross country with her young daughter, and interplay between others’ perceptions of them as mother-and-child and as black women. Dungy’s work can be found in NER 36.2.

Valeria Luiselli was also named a finalist in the criticism category. Her work Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions provides stark contrast between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children living in the US. Luiselli’s work “Stuttering Cities” (translated by Christina MacSweeney) appeared in the 35.1 issue of NER.

James Longenbach was named a finalist for poetry. His collection of poems, titled Earthling, blends the meditations of a modern-day “earthling” with many different perspectives, exploring what it means to be an inhabitant of Earth and how we confront our own mortality. Longenbach’s writing has been published multiple times by NER, most recently in 32.1.

Rickey Laurentiis has been awarded the prestigious Whiting Award for poetry. The Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, is based on early accomplishment and the promise of outstanding writing to come. Laurentiis’s debut book is titled Boy with Thorn: Poems, and his poem “Memory and Happiness” appeared in NER 36.2.

Two NER authors were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their poetry. Each year, roughly 175 Fellowships are awarded to individuals who demonstrate exceptional capabilities in productive scholarship, or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Monica Youn is the author of three books: Blackacre, Ignatz, and Barter. Her work has also been published in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Lana Turner, the Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her work appeared most recently in NER 37.1.

Reginald Dwayne Betts has published three collections of poetry: Near Burn and Burden: a collection of poems, Sahid Reads His Own Hand, and Bastards of the Reagan Era. His work can be found in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

And lastly, James Magruder‘s new musical Head Over Heels will be premiering on Broadway this month. The musical is an adaption of Sir Philip Sidney’s well known play Arcadia and features a mash-up of the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. His story story “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” appeared in NER 32.3.

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