NewPages Blog

James Kaelan’s We’re Getting On opens with an inscription that reads, “This book is dedicated to Leslie Epstein who hated this novella, and to Ha Jin who was considerably more amenable.” This prelude is odd but apt, a warning that says, Continue reading “We’re Getting On”

At some point in your relationship with You Can Make Him Like You, you may want to familiarize yourself with the Hold Steady, a Brooklyn-based rock group with roots in Springsteen, Husker Du, and the Twin Cities. Author Ben Tanzer says the novel is “inspired by, and an homage to” the group: It’s from their discography that Tanzer borrows its title and section headings, and when protagonist Keith can’t handle the pressures of a thirtysomething Chicagoan, he spins Boys and Girls in America or Stay Positive, the group’s two break-out records. Continue reading “You Can Make Him Like You”

Kate Colby’s Beauport is both a book-length poem and a collection of poems; it is a semi-narrative, part-memoir, part-lyric essay, part-historical exploration, part-imagined conversation work which wraps history with history. “History is spreading,” Colby states, toward the beginning of the collection. But whose history? Beauport is about layering histories: the story of Henry Davis Sleeper, the American antiquarian and decorator, whose house is named Beauport, the harbor along with an exploration of Colby’s own connections to Massachusetts and Gloucester, and the history of Beauport, the house itself. Continue reading “Beauport”

The New Tourism is a collection of new poems by Harry Mathews, the avant-garde writer with associations to both Oulipo and the New York School. The book is divided into three sections, each quite different from one another. The first section consists of a single poem, written in six parts, called “Butter and Eggs: a didactic poem.” Using language more often found in a cookbook than in a collection of poetry, the poem may remind readers of Mathews’s short story “Country Coking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double),” with its rich writing about food and deadpan use of humor. Continue reading “The New Tourism”

In “Pretty to think of the mind at its end,” Carol Frost describes the mind of an Alzheimer’s patient as “a metaphysician beekeeping / after the leaves have fallen at autumn’s end.” In “I remember the psychiatrist’s exam—”, it is “a papery hive sliced / open, herself furious.” In “Two anthills and a late summer hive,” she writes: Continue reading “Honeycomb”

Justin Hamm’s first chapbook of poems, Illinois, My Apologies, is a wonderful sampling of Midwest-soaked poems, dripping in fathers and broken down factories. As a Midwesterner, I not only identify with these poems, but feel they express the frustrations of the region with the utmost accuracy, accompanied by some light humor and beautiful language. The beginning of “At Sixteen” showcases this best: Continue reading “Illinois, My Apologies”

The Bee-Loud Glade will make you fall in love with the simplicity of nature. It is a story about returning and integrating one’s self into nature—true Walden style. The ability of Steve Himmer to create a longing for nature via the words and storyline in this story is phenomenal. I, personally, have never felt a calling or inclination towards nature. After reading this novel, I feel like becoming a hermit and simply reveling in the beauty of nature would be an amazing life. Continue reading “The Bee-Loud Glade”

For the uninitiated reader, greenhouses offer an organic simplicity in which glass filters sunlight and soil keeps different plants in calm synchronicity. But the trained, dedicated eye of Jen Hirt in her debut memoir Under Glass yields more. For Hirt, the scion of an Ohio greenhouse dynasty founded by her great-grandfather in the 19^th century, these glass panels, and everything within, signal a family’s and family business’ demise. Continue reading “Under Glass”

The White Museum is written in the casual, chatty style similar to that of Billy Collins. Bilgere has a dry sense of humor that simultaneously pokes fun and is hyper-aware of his standing as a white, middle-aged man. Like Collins, his humor often takes a turn into the dirty-old-man realm, referring to “the girls” “trying out their newfangled breasts” in “Solstice,” and his “star[ing] at the breasts / of that sixteen-year-old girl / in the sky-colored bikini. Touching them / would mean the electric chair, / but still…” in “Americana.” Continue reading “The White Museum”

Where the Road Turns is a rich and textured collection of poems interested in gender roles, issues of cultural identity, and migration. The book opens with the poem “Cheede, My Bride: A Grebo Man Laments—1985,” a narrative poem from the perspective of a Grebo man who contemplates the role of his wife in society: “in Monrovia, women wear pants and a man / may walk around, twisting like a woman” and “they say women fell trees and men walk / upon them like bridges.” The first section of the book contains similar poems that are from the perspectives of tribal men and women, often directly addressing their lovers in a love song or lament. In “Love Song When Musu Answers Her Lover,” the plain diction and repetition of “Let us not make babies, Kono, my lover / Let us collect these timbers, scattered” authenticates the voice of the poem, allowing the reader to enter into a character that they may not be altogether familiar with. Continue reading “Where the Road Turns”

Pickled Dreams Naked, the latest book of poetry from New York poet Norman Stock, puts you, the reader, in a curious place. See, Stock’s poetry is filled with the bizarre and the surreal, showing his penchant for the mesmerizing and often unsettling image. “Give Us This Day” finds Stock painting himself as “the cold cut hanging in the delicatessen of the starving,” a sandwich “barely held together in your hungry hands.” Latinas on subways sucking lollipops, transplanted kidneys, and oh so many chickens carve out perches in the pantheon of Stock’s poetry. Continue reading “Pickled Dreams Naked”

What do Ms. McCullough’s poems signify? How can speech act? How are actions inhabited/inhibited by speech? Who’s on first, noun or verb? Penis or vagina? Sex or love or both? Or an avocado that might taste like vanilla? Who’s Ms. McCullough in these pages? Continue reading “Speech Acts”

If you want spirit, attitude, and a slap of honesty, then #Dear Twitter is the sort of poetry that will be your best friend. Mahogany L. Browne has a way of rendering her poems both aesthetically pleasing and succinct. She can capture a ray of beauty in less than 140 characters and teach the reader a life lesson at the same time. This is a book of poetry that will appeal mostly to younger generations; readers who are avid users of Twitter will garner the most from this book, but everyone will benefit from its humor and wise words—for example, “dear bones: u will break. Dear spirit: u will shatter. Dear heart: u will bruise again & again, but u will be the hardest to fix…” Continue reading “Dear Twitter”

The concept of poet Dan Boehl and visual artist Jonathan Marshall’s Kings of the F**king Sea feels like something thought up in an Austin bar after an MFA workshop, between their third and fourth Lone Stars. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s an appealing looseness in the execution of the book’s idea, which I’ve mentioned twice now without explaining. Jack Spicer is the captain of a pirate ship whose crew goes by the name in the book’s title, and includes Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell. The Kings face off against Mark Rothko, the captain and sole member of a rival ship called the Cobra Sombrero. Continue reading “Kings of the F**king Sea”

Edan Lepucki is a master at characterization and humor. Her novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me, narrated by a pregnant woman describing to her unborn child the series of events leading to its conception, would likely be a sentimental flop if not for the enormous personality of its protagonist, Joellyn. Joellyn is a woman who boosts her self-esteem by gazing at her breasts in the bathtub faucet, whose reflection makes them huge, “the nipples wide-eyed, like they’d just walked into their own surprise party.” She is someone who imagined as a kid that she would grow up to be a Valkyrie, warrior-type woman, “vicious and beautiful, the roar of some exotic animal made physical.” She habitually imagines herself intimate with men she’s not attracted to and sleeps with them as good deeds, but wears the ugliest pair of underwear she owns on first dates to prevent herself from taking off her clothes too early. Continue reading “If You’re Not Yet Like Me”

The latest translation of the German author and theatre director Jenny Erpenbeck’s work, Visitation, is a philosophical thesis on permanence/impermanence filtered through the lens of a small lake and neighborhood near Berlin. This lake, called Brandenburg, is the setting for the entire work. More specifically, the reader is introduced to a singular plot of land, from its very formation to the present day. Most of the book is constructed as a series of closely intertwined short stories, each presenting the viewpoint of a character inhabiting or interacting with this particular piece of land. Continue reading “Visitation”

Unlike much poetry in translation that seems to lose its flavor and to blend together into the bland, uniform “translated” voice, Christopher Mattison’s translation of Gleb Shulpyakov retains his unique voice and undeniable cultural heritage. Some poems emphasize his foreignness, with references to Russian history and culture, such as, on page 17, when the poem references “Suvorov’s infantry,” “beards from Vladimir,” and the phrase “From Moscow to Podolsk no Pasternak could find / the way through such weather.” Leaving in these cultural markers adds an air of authenticity and believability to the work, and, most importantly, ensures the preservation of the poet’s original voice. Continue reading “A Fireproof Box”

That history and personal memory can become one and the same is nothing new. The Internet and Facebook are merely faster ways to gather fact and thought. Continue reading “Historic Diary”

After reading only a page of Hank, I remembered the “point” of poetry. Or art in general, really. To make the experiencer experience feelings. That's it. Isn't it? Hank is good at that. Continue reading “Hank”

In Our Island of Epidemics, Matthew Salesses presents a series of fourteen pieces of flash fiction which work together to tell the history of an island of, well, epidemics. On this island, one epidemic follows another and the community suffers collectively. While epidemics of oversensitive hearing, hunger, and farts may not be so appealing, the epidemic of memory loss brought immigrants to the island who “came, after a bout of suffering, to catch the disease and stay.” Other epidemics the island must suffer through include unstoppably growing hearts, bad jokes, insomnia, obsession, unrequited love, magic, lost voices, and talking to animals, to name a few. The narrator writes: Continue reading “Our Island of Epidemics”

What if the Messiah hadn’t been born yet? What if we never had Jesus? Or, what if he had been born in an insignificant town in North Dakota? Well, history would certainly be different, and Nazareth, North Dakota tells us how it may have happened in modern times. Tommy Zurhellen weaves a story of biblical intrigue, giving an age old story a new spin. Zurhellen makes it truly easy to step into a foreign world, but a world that has been known since childhood by many. Continue reading “Nazareth, North Dakota”

The short stories in Michael Hemmingson's Pictures of Houses with Water Damage offer a disturbing, sometimes harrowing, portrayal of human relationships. Like water seeping down behind plaster walls, once the problems come into the open, it's already too late. Continue reading “Pictures of Houses with Water Damage”

Becoming Weather is introduced by a quote from Nietzsche that describes the shifting changeability of the collection—“That the world is not striving toward a stable condition is the only thing that has been proved.” Like the weather, Martin’s poems can quickly change from light to darkness, frigidity to a blazing heat. The writer explores this movement and the act of writing about movement—in poem 3 of the first section, “Disequilibrium,” he states: Continue reading “Becoming Weather”