Idra Novey is the author of the novel Those Who Knew, a Best Book of 2018 with NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, O Magazine and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Coun­try, a final­ist for the 2008 Fore­word Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Con­sid­ered, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writ­ers Mag­a­zine, the PEN Trans­la­tion Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. She has also translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Pas­sion Accord­ing to G.H. She’s taught at Columbia University, NYU, the Catholic University of Chile, and in the Bard Prison Initiative. Currently, she teaches fiction at Princeton University.

“[Idra] Novey’s collection deftly navigates complex ideas about politics, history and memory by creating timeless allegories…The Next Countryis a quiet beauty of a book.”
―Lilith

“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

“[Idra] 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

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

“The title of [Idra] 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

“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

“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