MER Bookshelf – June 2024
Staff Picks – new books of fiction, memoir, and poetry.
–Compiled by Melissa Joplin Higley.
Alison Stone, Informed, NYQ Books, May 2024, poetry
Pulling traditional forms into the 21st century, Alison Stone uses pantoums, ghazals, a jeweled sonnet crown, and other structures to explore the subjects of contemporary life. Love, sex, family, politics, and the pandemic are both confined and liberated into the frameworks in which Stone places them. Claiming and owning these forms allows Stone to bring a rich and layered music to these poems, leaving the reader both moved and transformed. https://www.nyq.org/books/title/informed
Libby Maxey, Indwelling: Poems, Resource Publications, March 2024, poetry
Indwelling explores different ways of being inside–inside a work of art, inside the history of a place, inside a pandemic’s constraints–but not necessarily at home. Isolated experience seeks the intimacy of indwelling, and that intimacy gradually expands to accommodate a broader, more global perspective. These are poems of connection attempted in the face of mortality, loss, and absence: they personalize encounters with abandoned houses, nod at other writers who will never nod back, and look in old places for alternatives to modern ruts. They dignify the mundane, past and present, and find hope there, too. https://wipfandstock.com/9798385209057/indwelling/
Rachel J. Bennett, Mothers & Other Fairytales, Word Works Books, May 2024, poetry
The poems in Rachel J. Bennett’s debut full-length collection, Mothers & Other Fairytales, draw on folkloric images and themes to map the absence of a mother in the poet’s life. The poems also move toward and through the poet herself becoming a mother, navigating the idea of mother from different angles—personal and collective, typecast and inhabited. This narratively propulsive, poignant collection explores what it is to be both parent and child and asks how what we bequeath can be different from what we have inherited. https://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Other-Fairytales-Rachel-Bennett/dp/194458563X/
Robyn Hunt, The Fiction of Stillness, Saddle Road Press, August 2024, poetry
These poems evoke the author’s focus on finding respite during breast cancer treatment and recovery – the physical touchstones carried into the chemo ward, the calming touch of her daughter, cherry juice to offset the loss of taste, and an ongoing retreat to a nearby porch. This dialogue with cancer seeks to dispel fear and offer remedy, including renewed understanding of stillness and healing. https://www.amazon.com/Fiction-Stillness-Robyn-Hunt/dp/B0D3X44HBB/
Rachel Zimmerman, Us, After, Santa Fe Writers Project, June 2024, memoir
When a state trooper appeared at Rachel Zimmerman’s door to report that her husband had jumped to his death off a nearby bridge, she fell to her knees, unable to fully absorb the news. How could her husband, a devoted father and robotics professor at MIT, have committed such a violent act? How would she explain this to her young daughters? And could she have stopped him? A longtime journalist, she probed obsessively, believing answers would help her survive. She interviewed doctors, suicide researchers and a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived. Us, After examines domestic devastation and resurgence, digging into the struggle between public and private selves, life’s shifting perspectives, the work of motherhood, and the secrets we keep. In this memoir, Zimmerman confronts the unimaginable and discovers the good in what remains. https://www.sfwp.com/books/zimmerman
Barrie Miskin, Hell Gate Bridge: A Memoir of Motherhood, Madness, and Hope, Woodhall Press, June 2024, memoir
In the summer of 2016, Barrie Miskin became pregnant with her daughter and was encouraged to discontinue the low dose of antidepressants she had been on for over a decade for the safety of the baby. This ended up being a grave mistake. By January 2017, Barrie was no longer recognizable to her family, her friends or herself and the world was no longer recognizable to her. In Barrie’s family’s desperate effort to obtain a diagnosis and a treatment, they journeyed through the cold, bleak and murky world of mental healthcare in the United States. Sometimes, they were met with compassion and care but more often than not, they were treated with dismissiveness, ignorance and sometimes, cruelty. When Barrie was finally diagnosed with the very rare condition of pregnancy induced depersonalization and derealization disorder, she had to begin the long climb out of the dark well she was imprisoned in – all while trying to raise her beautiful baby daughter, keep her teaching career, and preserve her marriage. Hell Gate Bridge brings rare mental illnesses into the light, seeks to heal the fractures in our broken maternal and mental healthcare system, and shows how we can overcome the impossible when we fight to save the ones we love. https://bookshop.org/p/books/hell-gate-bridge-a-memoir-barrie-miskin/20700394
Jessie van Eerden, Call it Horses, Dzanc Books, October 2024, fiction (novel)
Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip. Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known. Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived. With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love. https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/call-it-horses-ppb