NewPages Blog

Home/Birth is a wonderfully intimate term that invites an exploration of the body and the space it inhabits. When I first noticed this book, I was struck by this term, not yet knowing that this book is literally about the physical act of home-birthing. When I began to read the book, I was comforted to find that its content matched the intimacy of its title. From the start, the reader is placed in the midst of a conversation between Arielle Greenberg, Rachel Zucker, and various other voices which are frequently quoted by the two authors. The conversation is very personal, often detailing individual accounts of birth both at home and at the hospital. Continue reading “Home/Birth: a Poemic”

The creation of an entirely new form of performance art—drawing from modern dance, spoken word, and architecture—provides a provocative debut novel by Kirsten Kaschock. Sleight attempts to address the ever-pervasive issue of how art should function in and respond to the tragedies of the modern world. With an array of characters depicted in lyrical, short language, the novel unfolds in traditional from, small plays, word sequences, and boxes filled with words that experiment with the novel form in a self-reflective manner, allowing further introspection. Continue reading “Sleight”

Though hardly a household name in the U.S., Ludvìk Vaculìk is probably best known first among historians for his provocative publications during the Prague Spring in 1968, and then among the more eccentric students of literature and journalism. Even then, he’s not recognized for writing, but for championing modes of literature: samizdat, the precursor of underground DIY zines, which enabled Prague writers to thrive under harsh censorship, and the editorial street-beat columns known as Feuilleton. A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator, published in 1987, collects Vaculìk’s feuilletonic samizdat essays for an English audience. Continue reading “The Guinea Pigs”

Tom Limbeck, a social worker in New York City, lives a mundane life. His office life constrained ever more by budget cuts, his social life limited by his own depressive and obsessive tendencies, his world is restricted and hemmed in. But one thing fascinates Tom: a homeless young man named Michael who becomes part of his caseload. Such is the premise of A.G. Mojtabai’s novel Parts of a World. Continue reading “Parts of a World”

I don’t claim to understand all of Sommer Browning’s poetry, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading her first full-length collection, Either Way I’m Celebrating. Her work is smart and requires some effort to interpret; the eccentric, stream of consciousness writing subtly shifts from thought to thought and challenges readers to follow. And it’s certainly worth the undertaking. Browning’s poetry is flat out funny. For example, in the poem “Sideshow” she writes: Continue reading “Either Way I’m Celebrating”

A painfully articulate and driven first collection, The Language of Shedding Skin employs the powerful force of words to speak about struggles with race and gender. Niki Herd, a Cave Canem fellow, follows in a tradition that engages with lyric and rhythmic language, using song as a guiding principle. In poems that freely range in form yet always possess an emotional depth, this compact debut collection will captivate with its spirited language. Continue reading “The Language of Shedding Skin”

Mid Drift is Kate Hanson Foster’s first book of poems. Written in free verse, the poems are lyrical, dark as they plunge into snapshot memories of her past, and powerful. The poems take place in the city, at night, circling images of water, particularly of rivers, and the narrative, though only seen in glimpses, reveals a betrayal, an affair. Lowell is a recognized influence, in the last poem “Dear Lowell,” where the speaker claims, unconvincingly, to plan to leave the place she has written about so meticulously in poem after poem. The line in “Mill City,” “My mind is filthy with old, dear secrets” encapsulates the book—the speaker simultaneously holds the past “dear” yet recognizes it as “filthy.” Continue reading “Mid Drift”

British author Joan Aiken died in 2004, leaving behind a huge volume of work, including over a hundred books. She began with short stories, and this collection of nineteen tales is a fun introduction to Aiken’s quirky, imaginative style. The word “tale” is particularly apt for these stories; many of them read like old folk tales handed down through generations. Continue reading “The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories”

It takes a while to settle into Chad Faries’ Drive Me Out of My Mind: 24 Houses in 10 Years. A memoir that chronicles the author’s itinerant childhood, the book devotes a chapter (including a foreword and afterword, as well as three unnumbered “lost chapters”) to each childhood home. The book’s format is important, as it provides structure for the narrative events, flights of fantasy, poetic imagery, and dreams contained therein. Continue reading “Drive Me Out of My Mind”

It could have gone the other way for Peter Brown Hoffmeister. He could be strung out, in prison, or dead. In his first book, Hoffmeister chronicles his adolescent downward spiral and the events which signaled that he needed to pull up, one way or another, into wild, blue manhood. “When I think about my childhood, I am confused,” he says. “There is a lot about everything I don’t understand.” We readers are game to grapple alongside for understanding, as the author doles out suspenseful moments, employing super-tuned senses, providing rich imagery, grounded reflection, and the tension inherent in a coming-of-age tale in which drugs, violence, and a genetic tendency toward OCD conspire—“I bite my fingernails until they bleed, then I bite them over again to make sure they’re all even. They never bleed evenly enough. There is so much I can’t control.” Continue reading “The End of Boys”

Robert Fisher’s The God Machine takes after Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, with bits of Margaret Atwood’s more modern approach, Oryx and Crake. In The God Machine, a planet is harvested and controlled by “God.” God is, in fact, a computer maintained by a “superior” race of humans. The inhabitants of the planet, bred and brainwashed into submission, lead lives tightly controlled by the computer and its manipulators. That is, until Walter Dodge. Dodge questions, finds the truth, and reveals all, in turn becoming a god-like figure and bringing down the machine. This all happens in “Part 1.” Continue reading “The God Machine”

If a writer addresses conditions of extremity, does that exempt the work from critique, putting it somehow beyond the pale? Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff wrote Holocaust, a volume based on testimony from the Nuremberg Trials. There were times when it seemed to me that collection lacked what Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered a first condition for literature: “poetic transfiguration of reality.” Continue reading “Caput Nili”

Lee Martin’s introduction in New Stories from the Midwest promotes Midwest writers, sometimes overlooked by East Coast literati; however, this collection of nineteen writers illustrates less a sense of the Midwest than daring developments of plot and character, which illustrate contemporary realities. Continue reading “New Stories from the Midwest”

Everything has come before and will again,
But only the moment of recognition is sweet.
—Osip Mandelshtam, from “Tristia” Continue reading ““neither wit nor gold” (from then)”

In trying to locate an American identity, the politics of class infiltrate a collection seeking to amend the impossible with art. The Cold War, Kathleen Ossip’s second poetry collection, tackles the complex socio-economic class status conflicts that have been a staple of American culture for nearly the past century. Combining psychological and sociological documentation of the class phenomenon with past experience, in a relevant historical context, both challenges and informs the reader. Continue reading “The Cold War”

To testify, in the Christian sense, is to tell the story of how one became a true Christian. In the legislative sense, to testify is to provide an account or evidence under oath in a court of law. In his new poetry collection, Testify, Joseph Lease seizes the cultural moment in which one’s testimony is as important as one’s identity, when testimony supersedes identity to the extent that it becomes identity. In our recent moment, we have seen America’s financial cornerstone crumble and watched those responsible (well, some of them, anyway) plead their ignorance and innocence interchangeably, while others have used religious belief systems to shake the very foundational elements of our nation. Continue reading “Testify”

In One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainaina fulfills the promise of the title by returning to explore the paths he traveled while coming of age in Kenya and South Africa. Along the way, he traces the birth of his own desire to write down what he was experiencing, developing a complex narrative in which the personal and the public, the psychological and the political, are intertwined, sometimes joined harmoniously and at other times pulling in opposite directions. Continue reading “One Day I Will Write About This Place”

The close-up begins on the stairway. Forgotten silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) has been lured into police custody for the murder of screenwriter/kept man Joe Gillis (William Holden, the dead narrator in the pool) with the promise of cameras. Trailing her like movie extras are several LAPD officers and an attractive older woman. She and her wide-brimmed hat are the only bright objects in the frame. Moments ago she was pleased landing the exclusive on this Hollywood cougar murder, but her demeanor crumbles watching the demented Norma walk towards the newsreel cameras until her face blurs, then fades. Continue reading “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood”

One could describe Richard Froude’s FABRIC as a meditation on memory presented in prose poetry, but this description would elide too many deeply interesting facets of the work. While working from the basis of a consideration of memory’s inherent virtues and flaws, FABRIC creates a space within that consideration for the inspired moment. By “inspired,” I mean several things: the invented, the possibly mistaken, the obsessive, and the associative. Continue reading “FABRIC”

Fiction writers have long used the fairy tale genre as a potent vehicle for innovation and subversion, a trend that only intensified after the post-modern assault on canonical literature launched by Messrs. Barthes and Barth. By the 1960s, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges had already used the stuff of fable and fantasy to breathe new life into old forms, and authors such as Angela Carter and Robert Coover began manipulating both the form and content of classic fairy tales to interrogate and re-imagine some of the most basic assumptions of literary fiction. Continue reading “boysgirls”

Though Kelcey Parker’s collection of short stories, For Sale By Owner, falls comfortably into the genre of discontented housewife lit—tackling subjects such as the disillusionment of a “perfect” marriage, the depression that often accompanies excessive material wealth, or the fantasies people create to distract themselves from reality—it stands out in that it has distinctly well-developed characters who are crafted with beautiful depth. Parker’s writing is thoughtful and highly literary, and she pulls readers into the disappointment of her characters’ lives while maintaining a sense of wry humor and irony. For example, in the short story “Best Friend Forever Attends a Baby Shower,” Parker describes the ache of social rejection and the growling bitterness it inspires: Continue reading “For Sale By Owner”

Rusty Barnes’s Mostly Redneck, is, in fact, not “mostly redneck,” at least not in the way most would think of “redneck.” There are a few yokels, some pickups, a shotgun, but the pages are not inhabited by slack-jawed, one-overall-strap-loose, hill folk. The stories in this collection follow real people in all situations. For instance, in “This is What They Call Adventure,” Bob, who is simple, feeds the hens and meets a girl: Continue reading “Mostly Redneck”

In The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Jennifer Knox reveals a gift for making readers laugh. All 43 poems in this volume display great wit—a possible liability in hands less adroit than Knox’s. Fortunately, while rendering comical scenes, she never sacrifices pathos for a joke. Her poems feature complicated humor that emerges from funerals and interventions. Always keeping in view the high stakes for her speakers—and their friends, parents, and lovers—Knox dances on the edge of the ridiculous, obliging people to laugh at difficult situations for which there are not rational responses. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway”

There’s something to be said for the matter-of-fact voice that short-form fiction so effectively encourages. With it, images and situations that would be surprises if not entirely doubted are accepted without a bat of the lash from the narrator. Continue reading “Alien Autopsy”

A quotation attributed to William Butler Yeats can be found in cyberspace, “What can be explained is not poetry.” At least 63 people have “liked” this quotation, but not me. I appreciate explanation. Susan’s Scarlata’s new collection is bookended by both an introductory “Proem” and end “Notes.” The “Proem” explains that her 64 poems are: “A recoup of the Sapphic Stanza form… They are strung… linked without attempt to present any sum total.” The first poem, “What Is Your Business Here?” begins, “I dreamed I carried a snake / to a burnt cracked tree /…Our needs and wants” include “a plectrum” and we are advised to “throw these bits / in two directions at once.” “Plectrum” is explained in the notes: “A plectrum is a spear point used for striking the lyre.” Continue reading “It Might Turn Out We Are Real”