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NER @ AWP Portland

Northeast by Northwest: NER Writers of the PacNW

March 15, 2019

A reading with NER authors Geri Doran, Ismet Prcic, Janet Towle, and Wendy Willis.

Situated at the foot of the Green Mountains, New England Review looks in every direction when it comes to publishing great new writing. In this reading of poetry and prose from recent contributors, New England Review is proud to present four writers who live and work within view of the Cascades. This reading highlights the range of voices that NER has published over the past four decades, while celebrating writers of the Pacific Northwest.

A106, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1  
Thursday, March 28, 2019
10:30 am to 11:45 am 

Photo by Jay Eads

Geri Doran is the author of Epistle, Osprey (Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2019) and two previous collections of poems, Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (LSU Press, 2005). She has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Stegner Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the James Merrill House, Maison Dora Maar, Lighthouse Works, Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center, among others. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. 

Ismet Prcic is a Bosnian American writer. His debut novel Shards won the Los Angeles Times and Sue Kaufman awards for first fiction as well as the Oregon Book Awards in fiction. He received the NEA award in 2010 and is a Sundance Institute Screening fellow.

Janet Towle‘s fiction has appeared in The Normal School, Passages North, Eleven Eleven and New England Review. She won Carve Magazine‘s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest in 2016. She is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. 

Wendy Willis is a poet, essayist, and lawyer. She teaches poetry at the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon, and serves as the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and Oregon’s Kitchen Table. Her next book, Field Notes from the Republic, will be released in early 2019.


Stop by the New England Review table (14103) for a copy of our spring issue, hot off the press. Also pick up subscription specials and back issue bargains, and sign up for our raffle. Also see our panel, Dear Lit Mag Editors: Now What? on Thursday, March 28, at 1:30 pm.

Filed Under: Events, News & Notes Tagged With: Geri Doran, Ismet Prcic, Janet Towle, Wendy Willis

New Books by NER Authors

February 6, 2019

“A Little Gut Magic’ invents a genre: imaginative decency. Is that a genre or a style? Is this a book or an embrace? In these spikey days of distance and exclusion, Matthew Lippman is trying hard to find room for everyone, and almost succeeds.”—Bob Hicok

Matthew Lippman is the author of four poetry collections—The New Year of Yellow (winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Sarabande Books), Monkey Bars, Salami Jew, and American Chew (winner of the Burnside Review of Books Poetry Prize). He published the essay “The Big Beautiful Barbeque That Is Manhood: Jay Nebel’s poem “Men” in the NER Digital Series. His poem “King Stuff” appeared in NER 35.2 (2014).

A Little Gut Magic can be found online or at your local independent bookstore.


“Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.” — Kirkus Review

From the publisher: Searing in its emotional honesty, Womanish explores what it means to be a black woman in today’s turbulent times. Writing with candor, wit and vulnerability on topics including dating after divorce, depression, parenting older children, the Obamas, and the often fraught relations between white and black women, McLarin unveils herself at the crossroads of being black, female and middle-aged, and, ultimately, American.

Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down, Meeting of the Waters, and Jump at the Sun, and a memoir, Divorce Dog: Motherhood, Men, & Midlife. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, The Washington Post, Slate, The Root and other publications. She is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Associated Press. McLarin appears regularly on the Emmy-Award winning show Basic Black, Boston’s long-running television program devoted to African-American themes. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, and a member of the board of PEN New England. Her essay, “Eshu Finds Work” appeared in NER 38.1 (2017).

Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life can be found online or at your local independent bookstore.


“Willis’s nuanced and interior approach to politics is a welcome departure from the harsh rhetoric so popular today. Even readers who disagree with her will appreciate her sincerity and experiences as a mother, lawyer, and author.” —Library Journal

From the publisher: In these pointed and wide-ranging essays, Wendy Willis explores everything from personal resistance to the rise of political podcasts, civic loneliness to the exploitation of personal data, public outrage to the opioid crisis—all with a poet’s gift for finding the sacred in the mundane, a hope in the dark.

Wendy Willis is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. Winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, she has published two books of poetry. Willis is a lawyer, the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, and the founder and director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table at Portland State University. She published her essay “The Word Made Flesh: On Encountering the Work of Marcel Broodthaers” in the NER Digital series and the title essay “These Are Strange Times, My Dear: Considering Ai Weiwei’s @Large” in NER 36.2 (2015).

These Are Strange Times, My Dear can be purchased online or at your local independent bookseller.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Kim McLarin, Matthew Lippman, Wendy Willis

New Books from NER Authors: September 2017

September 26, 2017

From the publisher: A Long Late Pledge, Wendy Willis’s second book of poems and the first from Bear Star Press, arrives at the perfect moment in our national conversation about democracy, what it is and where it has failed. Willis’s book suggests what remedies there might be for resurrecting its original premise, this time including a pledge to honor what was left out of its charters and laws the first time around. Grounded primarily in the landscape of Willis’s home state of Oregon, the book contains a number of poems that find their footing farther east as well, as far as Monticello and beyond, and contains an afterward of sorts, “notes & commonplaces” that readers will want to consult from time to time as they read the poems.

Wendy Willis graduated from Georgetown University School of Law and now serves as executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, a national organization of “more than 50 foundations, nonprofit organizations, and universities, collaborating to support research activities and advance democratic practice in North America and around the world.” Her first book is Blood Sisters of the Republic (Press 53, 2012), and she has published essays and poems in Utne Reader, ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, and New England Review. Her essay “These Are Strange Times, My Dear: Considering Ai Weiwei’s @Large” appeared in 36.2 and her piece on Marcel Broodthaers appeared on NER Digital.

A Long Late Pledge can be purchased through SPD Distribution or directly from Bear Star Press.

℘

“With subtlety and insight, with precision and passion, Paisley Rekdal explores the consequences of the Vietnam War for Vietnamese, Americans, and herself. The result is The Broken Country, a moving and often gripping meditation on the fallout of war, from violence and racism to melancholy and trauma.”
—Viet Than
h Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

From the publisher: The Broken Country uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. To make sense of the shocking and baffling incident—in which a young homeless man born in Vietnam stabbed a number of white men purportedly in retribution for the war—Paisley Rekdal draws on a remarkable range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and also by American-born veterans over the past decades.

Paisley Rekdal is the Poet Laureate of Utah and a professor of English at the University of Utah. She has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. She has contributed to New England Review on several occasions, with her poems Leash and Horn of Plenty appearing in the current edition (38.3).

The Broken Country can be purchased directly from publisher University of Georgia Press or from independent booksellers.

℘

“There is a tidal force at work in these poems. They rush toward the reader with frenetic intensity, then slowly recede, leaving us drenched in language that is working at its highest level, language riding meaning the way foam crests a wave.”
—The Rumpus

From the publisher: When the Gnostic Gospels collide with new age spiritualism, the Oxford Happiness Test, and treatises on Buddhist practice, we know we’re in the territory of a Bruce Beasley collection. Known for his intense and continuing soul-quest through previous award-winning books, Beasley interrogates the absurdities and spiritual condition of twenty-first century America with despair, philosophic intelligence, and piercing humor.

Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poetry. He has won three Pushcart Prizes, and his work appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize. He most recently appeared in New England Review with his poem “Shibboleth” (38.2).

All Soul Parts Returned can be purchased directly from publisher BOA Limited or from independent booksellers.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: Wendy Willis

NER Digital

Wendy Willis

February 7, 2017

The Word Made Flesh:
On Encountering the Work of Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers—Maria, 1966

My husband and I fantasize about what we will do when we abandon poetry. He says cobbler. I choose seamstress. Anything to avoid the existential aggravation that comes from tying yourself in knots for a readership that seems to be made up almost exclusively of other poets. We got to see just such a transition enacted at MoMA’s retrospective of the work of Marcel Broodthaers, a Belgian poet turned visual artist, who died in 1976 at the age of 52.

Broodthaers announced his abandonment of poetry and embrace of the visual arts in 1964, after having spent several months holed up in his new studio. In the catalogue for his first show, he wrote: “I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time, I have been no good at anything. Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.”

In that first show, Broodthaers encased leftover copies of his book, Pense-Bête, in plaster, eggshells, and plastic balls. The overall effect is both desecratory and dear. While it clearly could be interpreted as a rejection of poetry—“I am done with this art and all its petty, ephemeral preoccupations, I therefore subsume it into the more substantial, ocular, high-flying conceptual world”—it also has a quality of grasping for solidity and permanence, as if the paper and sentiment that make up these poems are too fragile to hold up to the forces of the world without a little plaster to stabilize them.

Though I identify strongly with the artwork Pense-Bête, I am most attracted to the work that immediately follows. Broodthaers spent from 1964 to 1968 building large sculptural pieces featuring shellacked mussel shells and others from heaps of cracked egg shells.

Granted, I am susceptible to the pretty, and these pieces are very pretty in their monochromatic simplicity and fragility. I cannot stop thinking about how hard it must be to transport these pieces from one place to another without a catastrophe of shattering shells. But I am also reminded of the Zen saying: “No matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet.” Of course, it is an exhortation toward direct experience, though when I first heard it, I resisted its tone of wise certainty. I do believe in the power of words. I believe in the power of words to make me feel wet even when my skin and hair remain dry. But even as an evangelist of the word, I am moved by the directness of Broodthaers’s eggs and mussels. They transport me to another family’s breakfast table. Into the life of a lonely office worker stopping for Moules-frites on his way home to his dim apartment. They reek with sorrow for the chickens and the mussels, too. And what about the busboy who cleared the plates? Who separated the trash?

There is one piece in particular that reveals the shallowness of Broodthaers’s bravado. He said he did it for the money, the art, but Maria is where his tenderness leaks through. Maria is simple enough—a navy blue housedress hung on a wooden hanger with the belt draping from it as it would in the closet. Tied to the bottom of the right sleeve is a paper shopping sack printed with a faded cheese ad dotted with broken eggshells. As these things do, the dress seems impossibly small and frail. But the cracked, stained, and haphazard eggshells glued to the shopping bag are all dailiness and loss and brokenness. It is as if mortality attached itself to a shopping bag.

It makes me feel naïve and provincial to respond to a major New York retrospective in such a simplistic emotional way. And in ordinary times, I would have walked away with a vague sense of affection for Broodthaers and his tender and rollicking transition from poet to conceptualist. But on March 21, 2016—two days after we visited MoMA—three men blew themselves up in massive, coordinated bombings in Brussels. Two were in the airport. One was at a Metro station. Thirty-two people were killed, and over 300 were injured. The news of the attacks spurred another worldwide wave of fear and recrimination, knocking even Donald Trump out of the headlines for a while. Even then he was already was ever-present in the news, though we did not yet know what was to come.

Though I hate to admit such superficiality, the experience of having been to the Broodthaers exhibit made Belgium feel much closer. Not only could I envision Brussels more clearly, but it sharpened my physical connection to the event itself. I could almost feel the reverberations of the blasts tremor through my body.

In the ensuing—and righteous—debate over why we publicly mourn brutal attacks in Brussels and Paris more than we do the ones in Lahore and Iskandariya and Kabul, we are right to question whether we are racist and colonialist and Euro-centric in valuing some lives over others. But I wonder if some of our failures in attention also stem from a lack of imagination. That is not to say that we should not interrogate our own callousness toward brutality everywhere, particularly if it is informed by colonialism and racism, but it is to affirm the value of art like that of the Broodthaers shell period. The straightforward connection to the body created by pieces like Maria tied me to Belgium physically and viscerally, increasing my imagination in favor of the people of Brussels.

That is a feat in this era of 24-hour breaking news, maudlin public mourning, and compassion fatigue. Broodthaers delivers breakfasts and dinners and off-beat patriotism. He forces me to imagine chickens and dockworkers and dishwashers with their particular sufferings and quickly passing lives. His work expands who I worry about and who I mourn. It takes Belgium off the map and places it squarely in the kitchen. It makes metaphor three-dimensional. It gives poetry flesh.

♦♦♦

Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland, Oregon. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, an organization representing more than 50 foundations, nonprofit organizations, and universities, collaborating to support research activities and advance democratic practice in North America and around the world. Willis’s next book of poems, A Long Late Pledge, will be released by Bear Star Press in September 2017.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital Tagged With: Marcel Broodthaers, Wendy Willis

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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