The Next Country

by Idra Novey

Overview

In these powerful lyric poems, Idra Novey’s exploration of “country” extends beyond national boundaries into the countries of marriage and family, history and the unspoken, leading to a bold and imaginative reckoning of the self with the larger world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781882295715
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	11/01/2008
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	714,954
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Idra Novey has received awards from the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her poems have appeared in Slate, the Paris Review, AGNI, and Ploughshares, and a book of her translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, was published in 2007. She teaches at Columbia Universityand in the Bard College Prison Initiative.

Read an Excerpt

From “Into the Atacama”:

When I said I wished this trip, I meant the rush of song
as we left the city. I meant the bus. I meant the woman who
played her flip-fl ops like drum sticks against the window.
For singing with strangers in a desert is like getting closer
to the moon. And the glow of a moment is like a moon,
caught behind clouds and then visible and then hidden again.

And when I said here, I meant elsewhere—I meant moving.

Editorial Reviews

Big-hearted, individualistic in scope and voice, Idra Novey’s The Next Country surveys a terrain that’s truly multifaceted and calibrated down to every word, every nuance. Each poem’s imagistic certainty enlarges meaning. Line by line, a playful innuendo moves us, and we find ourselves in that rugged country of the human spirit where enlightenment and surprise are twin rulers.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

"The Next Country is a choice collection of poems. Bold, immediate, uninhibited by fashions, they are very American originals. Drawn from a big landscape, they are intimate with New York and Chile, desert and river, indoors and outdoors. Novey generates the lively mental action that is the joy of true art."—Marie Ponsot

"The title of Novey's collection resonates throughout, whether referring to foreign land, dreamscape, marriage or 'the unseen face.' The miraculous and unexpected interrupt the commonplace, as when a violin assembles itself in the poet's coat pocket, or when a blind donkey occupies a dead tiger's cage at the zoo. In the end, we are transported 'To Byzantium, By Train,' on a journey of haunting self-transformation, and we realize in what deft hands we have been held from the beginning."—Carolyn Forché

“In The Next Country, Idra Novey exemplifies a quiet identification with the everyman, not an exclamatory one.”- Great American Pinup

"Novey strikes a fine balance between hints and allusions to political history and generalized or allegorical locales, not proper nouns or place names but 'leaping wells to the underworld'. . ."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Each poem is a country and as we read we move from country to country, between regions of human experience, through the territory of the imagination… Novey’s appeal to our natural (irresistible) curiosity about where we are, where we are going, and what’s over the next hill, will win every time.”—Taurpaulin Sky

“Novey’s collection deftly navigates complex ideas about politics, history and memory by creating timeless allegories...The Next Country is a quiet beauty of a book.”-Lilith

"[Novey’s] spare poems are enticing…luring the reader in with just a few compelling, carefully chosen details…leaving the reader to marvel and wonder and want more."-Pleiades

“Big-hearted, individualistic in scope and voice, Idra Novey’s The Next Country surveys a terrain that’s truly multifaceted and calibrated down to every word, every nuance. Each poem’s imagistic certainty enlarges meaning. Line by line, a playful innuendo moves us, and we find ourselves in that rugged country of the human spirit where enlightenment and surprise are twin rulers.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

"The Next Country is a choice collection of poems. Bold, immediate, uninhibited by fashions, they are very American originals. Drawn from a big landscape, they are intimate with New York and Chile, desert and river, indoors and outdoors. Novey generates the lively mental action that is the joy of true art."—Marie Ponsot

"The title of Novey's collection resonates throughout, whether referring to foreign land, dreamscape, marriage or 'the unseen face.' The miraculous and unexpected interrupt the commonplace, as when a violin assembles itself in the poet's coat pocket, or when a blind donkey occupies a dead tiger's cage at the zoo. In the end, we are transported 'To Byzantium, By Train,' on a journey of haunting self-transformation, and we realize in what deft hands we have been held from the beginning."—Carolyn Forché

“In The Next Country, Idra Novey exemplifies a quiet identification with the everyman, not an exclamatory one.”- Great American Pinup

"Novey strikes a fine balance between hints and allusions to political history and generalized or allegorical locales, not proper nouns or place names but 'leaping wells to the underworld'. . ."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Each poem is a country and as we read we move from country to country, between regions of human experience, through the territory of the imagination… Novey’s appeal to our natural (irresistible) curiosity about where we are, where we are going, and what’s over the next hill, will win every time.”—Taurpaulin Sky

“Novey’s collection deftly navigates complex ideas about politics, history and memory by creating timeless allegories...The Next Country is a quiet beauty of a book.”-Lilith

"[Novey’s] spare poems are enticing…luring the reader in with just a few compelling, carefully chosen details…leaving the reader to marvel and wonder and want more."-Pleiades

From the Publisher

The first half of this vivid debut reacts to the poet's travels, mostly in Central and South America. One poem watches "Ziggy Marley at the Estadio Nacional"; another envisions a nation in which "When asked about hunger,/ the children replied with hunger." Novey strikes a fine balance between hints and allusions to political history and generalized or allegorical locales, not proper nouns or place names but "leaping wells to the underworld"; she mixes prose poems with solidly crafted free verse, poems about particular sites with poems about travel itself, "from the Home Depot in Lima/ or in search of the Dalai Lama." Novey (who is also a translator) fills the second half of her volume with equally well-made poems about American places, which follow the history of a family, perhaps her own. "They met at Hardy's in a highway town," one poem opens; another looks harder at the American isolation of the plains, where "After the last house,/ the land extends like a hand before the mouth of a horse." Carolyn Forche selected Novey for a prestigious chapbook prize, and Novey's poems will certainly inspire comparisons to Forche's. But the wide range of this book attest that Novey has many unique gifts of her own. (Nov.)

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