Bøker av Idra Novey

New poetry by the author of acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth.Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda. Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: "Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we'd go under." Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our "bit part in the history of the future."[sample text]The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said Hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there like nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, get sucked to the bottom. We'd sink and become creek bed; its deep mud would claim us, hold us hard and close.

In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. Novey writes of the expanding prison complex that was once a field and imagines what's next for the civilians who enter and exit it each day.

"e;In a crumbling park in the crumbling back end of Copacabana, a woman stopped under an almond tree with a suitcase and a cigar.That was the last time anyone saw the famous Brazilian novelist Beatriz Yagoda. Upon hearing the news of her disappearance, her American translator Emma flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and Beatriz's two grown children conspire to solve the author's curious disappearance. But as the trio begins to uncover the bizarre and troubling affairs Beatriz has left in her wake, they realise their search for her is far more cryptic than they could have imagined. Are the secrets to Beatriz's disappearance hidden in her enigmatic novels? Or are her words obscuring more than they reveal?Brilliant, suspenseful, and compulsively readable, Ways to Disappear is a fabulously inventive novel about the ways we do appear to each other. Both playful and profound, it is as much a mystery as it is a manifesto on the joys of translation. Idra Novey is a bold, unprecedented new voice in American fiction. 'Reads like an Ali Smith novel with a fun Brazilian noir vibe.' - Publisher's Weekly starred review'Fleet and vivid.' - The New Yorker 'Lush and tightly woven . . . charges forward with the momentum of a bullet.' - New York Times Book Review'Unlike any novel you've ever read. It's a lush page-turner, a journey into the unique madness of modern Brazil, and a joyful ride into the crazed passion of literary creation itself.' - Hector Tobar 'It's impossible to put this book down, or to shake its residue once you've finished it.' - Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams "e;