New Pages Summer 2024 (2024)

Professor Timothy Brennan, editor

Songs of an Eastern Humanist: Collected Poems
Eris, 2024
From the Los Angeles Review of Books: "Two decades after Said’s death, we finally have access to 19 of these poems, written between 1956 and 1968, which have been compiled and edited by his biographer, Timothy Brennan. In the introduction to the collection, Brennan notes that Said’s heroes were 'essayists, satirists, and novelists, just as his favorite critics were theorists of the novel,' and that '[t]hinking of his comments on poetry, most would draw a blank.'... While these poems shed new light on his relationship with poetry—and an investment in not only reading but also writing verse—it is difficult to ignore the towering shadow cast by Said’s later works on these poems."

Associate Professor Kathryn Nuernberger, co-author

Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology
Bloomsbury, 2024
From the publisher: "Spanning decades and continents, and covering the rich field of poets writing today, this book shows how to read, explicate, and write poetry. Bringing together a comprehensive craft guide with a carefully collated anthology showcasing the (existing) limits of what is possible in poetry, this text explores how poetry since the 20th century has embraced traditional structures, borrowed from other disciplines, and invented wildly new forms. With close readings, writing prompts, excerpts of interviews from key figures in the field, and a supplementary companion website, this is the definitive text for any poet looking to continue their poetic journey."

Professor Katherine Scheil and Linda Shenk (PhD 2002), editors

Early Modern Improvisations: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins
Routledge, 2024
From the publisher: "An interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics. The book engages readers interested in texts that range from Tudor queens to Anglican missionary work in North America; from contemporary feminist television series to Ancient Greek philosophical concepts.... [A] sense of discovery that this collection’s contributors learned from its dedicatee, [Professor} John Watkins, a major literary and cultural historian."

Victoria Blanco (MFA 2013)

Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance
Coffee House Press, 2024
From Kirkus Reviews: "An affecting work of 'participatory research' delves into the life of an Indigenous Rarámuri family. In 2009, Blanco, then on a yearlong Fulbright fellowship to collect oral histories of the Rarámuri people living around Chihuahua City, Mexico, met and befriended the Gutiérrez family. Displaced to El Oasis, a 'settlement filled with subsidized housing for Indigenous peoples,' in the city several years before due to drought in the northern Sierra Madre, the family had fallen on hard times, as many similar families had.... Throughout the poignant, sometimes heartbreaking text, Blanco intimately captures the details of this family’s practices and dreams, making the narrative read as fluidly as a novel."

Taiyon J. Coleman (PhD 2013, MFA 2003)

Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
From Kirkus Reviews: "Coleman, a professor of English and women’s studies, grew up on Chicago’s South Side with a single mother of five children who 'died prematurely' at the age of 49.... Whether being told to accept hurtful slurs in a course designed to prepare her to teach composition [or] coping with racist medical care that led to preventable pregnancy loss, racism has pervaded every aspect of Coleman’s life. The author shows how she has surmounted these obstacles systematically. The result of her diligent work is this ebullient, insightful, frank, and humorous essay collection suffused with a joyful defiance."

Jennine Capó Crucet (MFA 2006)

Say Hello to My Little Friend [fiction]
Riverrun/Simon & Schuster, 2024
From the Atlantic: "It enlarges our sense of the possible, recalling the vanity of human aspiration not through a lens of ridicule but through one of empathy.... I’m not naive enough to believe that a work of fiction can change the way we live. Yet throughout these pages, Crucet insists that we rethink our models for engagement, with one another and with the world at large. Say Hello to My Little Friend is a social novel, a climate-change novel. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a city novel, a sprawling satire. And it is a commentary on identity and longing in a 21st-century America obsessed with its own ephemera, in which the consciousness of a single orca might bring us closest to a collective, and sustaining, reality."

Tarik Dobbs (MFA 2022)

Nazar Boy [poetry]
Haymarket Books, 2024
From the publisher: "A debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism. Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted."

Sally Franson (MFA 2013)

Big in Sweden [fiction]
Mariner/HarperCollins, 2024
From the publisher: "Paulie Johansson has never put much stock in the idea of family. Yet one night on a lark, she lets [best friend] Jemma convince her to audition for Sverige och Mig, a show on Swedish television where Swedish-Americans compete to win the ultimate prize: a reunion with their Swedish relatives. Much to her shock, her drunken submission video wins her a spot on the show. Armed with her Polaroid camera, a beat-up copy of Pippi Longstocking, and an unquenchable sense of possibility, Paulie hops on a plane to Sweden. Grappling with long-held notions of family, friendship, and love, Paulie starts to reconsider her past and rethink what she wants for the future."

Cheri Johnson (MFA 2005)

Annika Rose [fiction]
Red Hen Press, 2024
From MinnPost: "17-years-old, Annika lives in a trailer with her father where they’ve lived since her mother died when she was young. Her father, Wes, once had plans to build a house for the family, but that never happened, and the two have lived an isolated existence since in Northern Minnesota. Her world gets turned upside down when a young couple moves into the house on the neighboring property. Johnson details the natural surroundings amidst wild animals and human dangers, and uses precision in her descriptions of how social interactions can shift from one moment to the next. There’s a lot the author has to say in the story about power, survival, resilience, and the moments in life we can’t get back."

Alison McGhee (MA 1993)

Telephone of the Tree [children's fiction]
Rocky Pond Books, 2024
From Publishers Weekly: "Ayla and her best friend Kiri always reveled in their connections to their trees—a river birch and white pine, respectively—spending time nestled within their branches, encouraging each other to 'dream big.' When Kiri suddenly disappears, Ayla convinces herself that Kiri will be home for their 11th birthday in three weeks. Then an old-fashioned telephone mysteriously appears in Ayla’s tree, and her astute grandfather suggests that 'maybe it’s there just in case you want to call someone.' Employing spare, sensory language, McGhee explores the painful negative space created by loss and the devastation of a friendship cut short, as well as the healing found in moving forward."

Alison McGhee (MA 1993)

Dear Brother [children's fiction]
Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy, 2023
From the publisher: "Diary of a Wimpy Kid gets a little sister twist in this wildly funny and highly illustrated companion to middle grade novel Dear Sister that brings sibling rivalry—and love—to life through a series of letters. Sister has been the overlooked younger sibling for her WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE. But this time, the blatant injustice has gone too far. This time, America’s Famous Nothing has been granted the incredible power of choosing the family pet. And what does he choose? A bearded dragon. Sister is outraged. Then, adding insult to injury, Brother gets to go to summer camp, leaving Sister at home to take care of his disgusting lizard. Sister refuses to suffer in silence. She sends Brother letter after letter."

Joe Moses (PhD 1993), co-author

Writing to Learn in Teams: A Collaborative Writing Playbook for Students Across the Curriculum
Parlor Press, 2023
From Chris M. Anson: "Informed by years of the authors’ teaching experience as well as thorough research on teamwork across multiple settings, this guide effectively brings together the practical, psychosocial, and pedagogical elements of collaboration and collaborative writing. Beautifully designed and appealingly readable, it is the finest and most comprehensive interdisciplinary text on this subject that I have seen. It should be required reading for students in every writing-intensive course.”

Patrick Nathan (BA 2009)

The Future Was Color [fiction]
Counterpoint, 2024
From NPR: "The Future Was Color has everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist, and a deep understanding of a particular time and place. George—once György—is a gay Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood, occasionally fantasizing about his officemate, Jack. When a once-famous actress named Madeline invites George to stay and write at her spacious Malibu house, she won't take no for an answer—and so George finds himself in a hedonistic milieu where pleasure, politics and strong personalities intermingle."

Becky Peterson (PhD 2010)

Textiles on Film
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024
From the publisher: "The imagined worlds of the cinematic mise-en-scène are rich with textiles: fabrics drape over sets, serve as props, and develop mood and character as dress and décor. A much-needed examination of the cultural and emotional impact of textiles as mediated through cinematic technology, Textiles on Film broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between fabric and film. Drawing on scholarship across multiple disciplines and exploring a wide range of films—from lesser-known avant-garde films to big-budget Hollywood productions.... Becky Peterson unearths new possibilities for reading media and textile cultures."

Karen Rigby (MFA 2004)

Fabulosa [poetry]
Jackleg, 2024
From the Washington Independent Review of Books: "Fabulosa traces its lyrical contours through couture, cinema, figure skating, and visual art. The adulation and objectification that a rhetoric of glamour invites toward women and femininity is a consistent tension in these deft poems.... The book plants its roots in a commitment to the eclectic aesthetics that screens (silver or otherwise) and fashion (whether K-Mart or Dior) evoke. In Fabulosa, through Rigby’s attention to how figurative language is never decorative when done well, lyricism becomes both a shawl around the shoulders of the reader and a set of Kate Spade sunglasses—which is to say, we’re able to see ourselves and the world more clearly."

Amy Shearn (MFA 2005)

Dear Edna Sloane [fiction]
Red Hen Press, 2024
From Kirkus Reviews: "Seth Edwards is one of New York City’s many literary hopefuls. He hears whispers that one-hit-wunderkind Edna Sloane, who vanished from the public eye four years after her 1986 debut novel, An Infinity of Traces, shoved her into the spotlight, is not only alive, but still living in the city. Convinced that securing an interview with Edna will make his career, Seth attempts to cold email his way into her life. Shearn’s fourth novel is a collage of digital and analog correspondence and documents of all sorts. The protagonists’ pen pal relationship is endearing, and the book provides commentary on the industry that will appeal to career book people and pleasure readers alike."

Asha Thanki (MFA 2022)

A Thousand Times Before [fiction]
Viking, July 2024
From the publisher: "Ayukta is finally sitting down with her wife Nadya to respond to a question she’s long avoided: Should they have a child? The decision is complicated by a secret: the women in her family inherit a mysterious tapestry, through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her.... As Ayukta unspools these generations of women she reveals the tapestry’s second gift: the ability for each of these women to dramatically reshape their own worlds. Sweeping, deeply felt and intergenerational, A Thousand Times Before is a debut as poetic as it is propulsive, as healing as it is heartbreaking, as it examines what it means to carry our past with us and to pass it on."

Will Weaver (BA 1972)

Power and Light [fiction]
Calumet Editions, 2023
From Kirkus Reviews: "In Weaver’s historical novel, a Norwegian farm girl in North Dakota is assaulted by a prominent man, placing the family in a grimly precarious position. She’s slow to tell anyone, especially Emil, now the head of the family and prone to mercurial violence, since she believes no one will take her word over the doctor’s. However, she becomes pregnant from the assault, making the secret impossible to keep. Emil leaves the baby girl that results with an unsuspecting family on a train and begins to plot a ghastly revenge.... Weaver’s prose is beguiling, achieving a mercilessly spare poetry. A consuming work of profound poetical depth and moral power."