Idra Novey – författare

A taut and explosive novel about what a man thinks he can get away with, and the woman who stands in his way.On an unnamed island country, ten years after the collapse of a regime, Lena, a low-ranking professor at a marginal college, suspects that the powerful senator she was involved with back in her student activist days may be guilty. He''s definitely guilty of intimidating her, of touching her. But when a young woman he now works with turns up dead, Lena wonders if her senator is guilty of murder. And her suspicions intensify as clues fall into her lap.But what does it mean that Lena never spoke up about what happened to her? What about her family''s shameful history as well-known supporters of the former regime? What happened to this girl, and what should Lena do? Just when readers will believe they''ve worked out this mystery, Those Who Knew abruptly turns and what follows is a powerful, uncanny exploration of the cost of staying silent, and the mixed rewards of acting out, that takes readers from the island to New York City and back.

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 with 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.

New poetry by the author of acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth. dra 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. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to cellos playing in a former jail in Chile, she looks at prisons that have opened, closed, and transformed to examine how the stigma of incarceration has altered American families, including her own. 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.On BafflementWe drew a prison in the sand and it wouldn’t go away.Not even beneath the foam of the biggest waves.The torn leg of a starfish clung to the door.A piece of seaweed clung to the bars over the windows.The tide came in higher and we thought, So much for the prison.Somebody asked why did we draw that thing,And were we growing old watching it this way.We felt compelled to make love in the sand a few feet off.Then we drew another one, just to see if we’d make love again.