New England Review

NER Poetry Celebration

Video now available

If you missed our poetry celebration live on Zoom, you can now catch it here on Vimeo!

During this reading from the current issue of New England Review—Rick Barot’s last issue as poetry editor—we celebrated Rick’s seven years at the helm and welcomed new poetry editor Jennifer Chang, who read a poem from the forthcoming issue.

Featured in this reading are Philipe AbiYouness, Kaveh Akbar, Jennifer Grotz, Jenny Johnson, Dana Levin, Cate Marvin, Wayne Miller, Matthew Olzmann, Carl Phillips, Kevin Prufer, and Paul Tran. With thanks to Joe DeFelice from Middlebury’s media services.

NER Poetry Celebration

Join us September 9

Thursday, September 9
8 pm EST, 7 pm CST, 6p MST, 5 pm PST
ONLINE

Join us for a reading from the current issue of New England Review—Rick Barot’s last issue as poetry editor. We’ll be celebrating Rick’s seven years at the helm, and welcoming new poetry editor Jennifer Chang.

FEATURING

Philipe AbiYouness • Kaveh Akbar • Jennifer Grotz • Jenny Johnson • Dana Levin • Cate Marvin • Wayne Miller • Matthew Olzmann • Carl Phillips • Kevin Prufer • Paul Tran

Registration link: https://middlebury.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qLYotKipQEKHj1mx1EyPJg

Listen to NER

AbiYouness, Grotz, Johnson, Miller, and Phillips

Five NER 42.2 poets read their work aloud.

Philipe AbiYouness reads his poem “When They Cut The Power”: “When they cut the power, / we sliced the cantaloupe in the dark.”
AbiYouness also reads “يا ماما ! for the Empty House,” which touches on the varying forms and magnitudes of loss.
Jennifer Grotz reads “Poem or Story”: “My life from its start / was an expanding middle, my mother’s.”
Jenny Johnson reads “Submission”: “When you tear the top / off a marigold, there are / so many fine, loose strings.”
Wayne Miller reads “Camoufleurs”: “When the boys and I went out / in the woods with our BB guns, / we wore our fathers’ massive / fatigues. We shot each other / from inside our fathers’ / narratives.”
Carl Phillips reads “The Night, the Plan, the Stars,” which in only six lines plunges readers into a dreamlike scene.

April and May 2021

New Books by NER Authors

It’s been a great publication season for NER authors! In his latest collection of poetry, We the Jury (Milkweed Editions), Wayne Miller grapples with difficult questions and “faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior?” Miller’s poem, “On Progress” was featured in NER 37.2 and new work is forthcoming in our summer 2021 issue (NER 42.2).

Carey Salerno‘s Tributary (Persea Books) is another collection of poems grounded in search and discovery. “Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty.” Salerno’s poem, “Baptism with a Pond in It” was featured in NER 40.1.

Mark Neely, published in NER 37.2, released his third book, Ticker (Lost Horse Press). The title won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and has been praised by its final judge as “[containing] almost everything—religion, calamity, politics, race, love, children, the Challenger disaster, Taco Bell, Oliver North, CVS, a main character named Bruce. In these poems, which are all the time moving between the cynical and ecstatic, Neely never once turns his half-stare half-glare away from this strange, brutal country of ours.”

Celeste Mohammed, lawyer, emerging writer, and mother of a two-year-old, “reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream” in her novel, Pleasantview (Ig Publishing). Mohammed has won multiple writing awards, including the 2018 Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her debut story published in NER, the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. Her story appeared in NER 38.1.

Barrett Swanson published a “collection of critically acclaimed essays and reportage,” Lost in Summerland this May. The opening essay of the book was featured in NER 38.2. Elissa Gabbert, published in NER 41.3 and author of The Unreality of Memory, writes, “In essays that are moving and candid, personal and sweeping, Lost in Summerland seeks alternatives to national myths and tries to name the ‘unnamable turbulence’ we’re living through, to rescue the ineffable from invisibility.”

Naheed Patel is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, which published an article announcing her debut novel, A Mirror Made of Rain (Fourth Estate India). According to Patel, “I began writing A Mirror Made of Rain as a way to come to terms with the untimely death of my father. I hoped, by writing a character based on him, to keep him a part of my life for a bit longer…” Patel’s short story appeared in NER 39.3.

Noah Warren just published his second collection, The Complete Stories (Copper Canyon Press), where he, “…unravels histories both personal and public, picking apart their ugliness, beauty, and irreducible singularity.” His first collection, The Destroyer in the Glass was chosen by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Warren was published in NER 40.1.

You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Spring 2021 Bookshop page.

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