The Next Country
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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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.
"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
