Fall 2019 Pre-Orders Available

Update: All of our fall 2019 books have been officially released! Therefore, we’re closing our Pre-Orders page for now. Check back soon for news on pre-orders for our spring releases!

As we’re all gearing up for a new semester here at New Rivers Press and MSU Moorhead, we just wanted to send you all a quick reminder that pre-orders for our Fall 2019 books are now available at the link below. Get your hands on a copy before anyone else! Full details at the link.

Tom o’Vietnam Cover Reveal

Bearing witness to the depths of eloquence and grief, anger and endurance, this upcoming release from Baron Wormser blends poetry, history, and dark wit. Coming November 10, 2017!

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AUTHOR BIO

Baron Wormser is the author of nine books of poetry and a poetry chapbook. He is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry and the author of a memoir along with a book of short stories and a novel. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA program. He also is the Founding Director of Frost Place Converence on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 and 2005 and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005. You can visit his website at baronwormser.com.

COVER DESIGNER BIO

Kendal Christenson is an undergrad at Minnesota State University Moorhead studying Graphic Design, Graphic Communications, and Art. She enjoys her puppy, spending time on the lake, and sandwiches of the toasted variety. When she is not working or studying, Kendal can be found telling jokes that are not funny and conjuring up sassy designs.

PRAISE for Tom o’Vietnam

“Baron Wormser has done something important with Tom o’Vietnam in the way that he has identified and precisely embraced a stunningly particular historical moment we casually refer to as ‘Viet Nam,’ as if the name was not a country but a dark shroud of moral collapse that hangs over us still. More remarkably, he has constructed this narrative from the point of view of a combat soldier, fighting in the American War in Viet Nam. Somehow there is a deep legitimacy to this soldier’s story because Wormser has been excruciatingly precise in his consideration and use of details—what Hemingway called ‘getting the words right.’ Built into Tom o’Vietnam‘s narrative is a clever, bright and engaging analysis of King Lear that parallels the primary narrative in richly imaginative ways. Inventive, immodestly challenging more than a few literary fictive conventions, and sometimes even beautifully written, Tom o’Vietnam is, at the same time, in a class by itself and resonant of great works about Viet Nam that have come before.”

—Bruce Weigl, author of Song of Napalm: Poems and The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir

EXCERPT

Endless swearing, a hoarse, braying wind of words, a weary, scornful, bemused reply to a war, swearing at those who were there and those who were not, at the army and the enemy, at death and life: everything blasted, withered, and coated by the tongue of injury. The question behind each insult and mockery being: What in the vast scheme of motley doings conspired to put me here? How did speeches spoken by gasbags of every stripe over decades come to endanger my modest network of blood? And if I wanted to be here, in my arrogance, manhood, confusion, enthusiasm, stupidity, patriotism, I must swear all the more. Who could have known?
Out, dunghill!
Swearing about food, rain, heat, women, officers, and, most of all, each other, each of us in the same unpredictable predicament. Swears coupled with other swears, vicious adjectives meeting nasty
nouns: motherfucking shithead, goddamn asshole. Semi-swears, the ritual male abusing of male anatomy: you worthless little prick, the voice measured—a judgment—or light-hearted, oh, by the way. Long strings of swears blurring into one run-on, guttural frenzy. Or sometimes a simple “look, bitch,” which starts a few shoves, shoulder pushes, and glares, the saying that you are a woman—a low blow. Swears for what seems like no reason, your voice mysteriously alive, proclaiming you are here in this faraway hell where, even on a good, un-murderous day, you are pissed. A reason can be found, if you want to go looking, but a lot of grim bile is in us already. Though not always bilious, everyone was once an infant gurgling, burping, unaffected by the droppings of time, though I think of guys like Briggs or Stone, who probably by the age of two were waiting to get bigger so they could get to Vietnam and start shooting people. Someone kicked them down the stairs early, the war on the home front. Or without the proclamation of reason or motive, like the tattoos: born to be bad, born to lose, born a conniving, chip-on-the- shoulder bastard.
Bastardy base? Base?
Briggs bought it, to use the lexicon you adopt when you see much random death. There wasn’t a lot of him left either. He was what they call “remains.” That doesn’t matter, does it? Whether there’s 98 percent of you intact or 32 percent. No open casket for him, if you like an open casket, and a lot of people do, death looking sort of rosy and peaceful, a time-out after the end of time. It’s hard to make up for the missing 68 percent, though you never want to underestimate modern technology. I remember a lot of deaths, some miscellaneous, some not. Some I heard about second- and third- and fourth-hand as facts became legends but they still got inside me.
Did you hear? Dost thou know me

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Deep Calls to Deep Cover Reveal

Coming November 1, 2017 from Jane Medved: a spirit-filled collection of poems that moves seamlessly from the “smell of bones” to the firmament of the heavens.

 

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AUTHOR BIO

Jane Medved is the author of the poetry chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefish (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Mudlark, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and New American Writing. She is a graduate of the Shaindy Rudolph Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University and the poetry editor of The Ilanot Review. A native of Chicago, Illinois, she has lived for the last twenty-five years in Jerusalem, Israel, where she currently teaches poetry at the WriteSpace Jerusalem studio.

 

COVER DESIGNER BIO

Emily Zaharia is a third-year graphic design student with minors in Studio Art and Advertising. She aspires to be a graphic designer at an ad agency when she graduates.

 

PRAISE for Deep Calls to Deep

“Jane Medved’s Deep Calls to Deep is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic exploration of the many ways that history—both global and personal—impacts our lives. We are immersed in Medved’s astonishing universes, peopled by Cleopatra, Herod, and magical, warrior women who birth language and carry the burden of lost children. Marked by war and loss, these poems are also reverent, beautiful, and defiant: a woman buried in honey for seven years continues to haunt her husband. A mother mourns her child at a graveyard where ‘boys blossom, box after box.’ With great agility and skill, Medved crafts ghazals, sonnets, and free verse poems that rouse us with sonic pleasures. ‘You are flammable,’ the author reminds us, and indeed, in Medved’s poetry, we are.”

—Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign)

 

EXCERPT from “Story”

Once I tried to bake bread in the dirt. It hurt
my knees and the old women laughed.

They pointed to the lights across the Dead Sea
and said Go beg like Moses, if you love God so much.

Their prayers were as light as saddle bells.
They made hot water gush from the rocks.

But Moses got his own church, a whole valley
of haze and everything else that was promised.

In the end he covered his face and split
himself into words. A few of them are still lying

on the ground. I pick them up and carry them
across the Jordan in my mouth. They knock

against my teeth and try to get out. They want
to go home. So I sing to them about the walls

of Jericho falling while the gates are held up
by tiny bones. I say Don’t worry,

you won’t be buried like that. I will wash you
with my tongue. I will give you back your names.

I will place you on a clean white page
where things that never happened can be true.

 

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