Yusef Komunyakaa

Our prolific New England Review writers continue to amaze us with their March book publications.

Jessie Van Eerden, Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, recently published Call It Horses (Dzanc Books). According to John Englehardt, “…this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives.” Jessie Van Erden shared a new look at the story of Mary and Maria in NER 40.3, and you can hear her speak more about it on episode 13 of our podcast.

Novelist and short story writer, Brock Clarke released I, Grape; or the Case for Fiction (Acre Books) where he approaches the art of fiction from different angles. Clarke has published frequently in NER, most recently with the story “Transported” in NER 35.3.

Kim Addonizio’s eighth volume of poetry, Now We’re Getting Somewhere (Norton), “…is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out.” Addonizio’s poem, “Thousands of Times Throughout the Day” was featured in NER 36.3.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) is a compilation of poems from the past twenty years of his work along with new poems. A New York Times Book Review critic wrote, “He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.” Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was published in NER 16.1!

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

Mesmerizing and beautiful in the language and rhythms of his pen. ―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

We congratulate NER contributor Reginald Dwayne Betts on the recent release of his poetic collection Bastards of the Reagan Era (Stahlecker Selections). His work appeared in NER 35.5.

Regniald Dwayne Bett’s Shahid Reads His Own Palm won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. He is a Yale Law student.

Bastards of the Reagan Era is available from independent booksellers.

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Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period’s most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter . . . Dazzling. —David Wojahn, Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa

We are also pleased to announce Komunyakaa‘s collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally. He teaches at New York University.

The Emperor of Water Clocks is available from independent booksellers.

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A truly interdisciplinary thinker, Gregerson reaches through literature, art, and the everyday to find territory in which the confounding conditions of our age still give rise to understanding and empathy.—Publishers Weekly

NER is pleased to announce the publication of Linda Gregerson‘s first book of collected work, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books). Gregerson’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently NER 31.4.

Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.

Prodigal is available from independent booksellers.

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Shards of elegy, lament, intermittent flashes of wit, a philosophical sensuality throughout: this is subtle, sophisticated, gorgeous, and unsettling work by a poet open to being ‘torn by the lyric’ as well as history. Sze-Lorrain aims ‘to honor / the invisible,’ ‘to get silence right’: she does. —Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets

Fiona Sze-Lorrain‘s The Ruined Elegance: Poems has been published by Princeton University Press. Her work appears in NER 35.2.

Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell, writes of Ruined Elegance: “The luminous art of Sze-Lorrain reveals how imaginative vision requires the veil. Hers is a contemporary, polycultural poetry, a language of distance and silence, rich with suggestion. The disparate, brilliant images of her Ruined Elegance fend off narrative, ‘torn by the lyric,’ whose instrument is more enduring than its players: its ‘strings stayed taut. None / broke. Her fingernails did.'”

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist. The author of two previous books of poetry in English, My Funeral Gondola and Water the Moon, she also writes and translates in French and Chinese. She lives in Paris.

The Ruined Elegance: Poems is available from Princeton University Press and independent booksellers.

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Whether in praise songs, appraisals, or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace . . . The result is an extraordinary and ultimately irreducible debut. —Terrance Hayes, judge

Rickey Laurentiis has released his latest collection, Boy with Thorn, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Laurentiis’s work appeared in NER‘S Volume 36.2.

Laurentiis, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Boy with Thorn is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press and independent booksellers.

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A superbly personal biography that pulsates with intelligence, scholarship, and heart. —Kirkus Review

NER is pleased to announce that founding editor Jay Parini’s Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal was recently published with Doubleday Books. Parini’s work, including “An Interview with Gore Vidal” (NER 14.1), has appeared in multiple NER issues.

Parini has published over two dozen books, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Last Station, Robert Frost: A Life, and The Apprentice Lover. He is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. He has received honorary degrees from Lafayette College and the University of Scranton. Currently, Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College.

Parini’s access to Vidal and his thoughtful reflections on him establish this as the definitive biography of a major writer. — Publisher’s Weekly.

Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal is available from Doubleday Books and independent booksellers.