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.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The first half of this vivid debut reacts to the poets 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 Hardys 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 Noveys poems will certainly inspire comparisons to Forches. But the wide range of this book attest that Novey has many unique gifts of her own. (Nov.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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 University and in the Bard College Prison Initiative.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Aimee Walker
Format:Paperback
Idra Novey writes the kind of poetry that performs small miracles with every turn, and surprises her readers with each line. This book contains poems that are extremely intelligent, with enough wisdom and innovation to satisfy those who have read poetry for years. Yet the poems are also very readable, and their beauty beckons even to those who may not consider themselves poetry readers. Anyone who wants to know more about how language, nation, and family can shape our lives and our relationships, should read this book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The observations in THE NEXT COUNTRY are quiet, yet acute and artful. One of my favorite poems in the collection was about passing through Customs with her husband--not declaring the catalog of the risks or secrets of the human heart. Another "Postcard of Two Birds, Scattered Feathers" is focused and tight, yet leaves room for the reader to make the reader's own discoveries about relationships in the "green quiet." "Nocturne with Waking Bear" is also a fine poem. Novey's poems are uniquely positioned. Here is an artist who is thinking about how to set her poems in easily receivable, but artful new ways--a very good impulse for a poet with much to bring to the table! After reading "The Next Country" I wanted more Novey poems . . . another Novey book . . . .
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an amazing first book, lyrical and beautiful but also full of meaning. These poems are so insightful, smart, funny, and everything that poems should be. The "next country" is an apt metaphor for the different territories of people's lives, and occasionally in physically disparate places.
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