Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Upcoming and new books on our radar!
Megan Merchant, Hortensia, in Winter, New American Press, October 2024, poetry
Hortensia, in Winter, winner of the New American Poetry Prize, is a series of prose poems addressed to an ancestor who travelled with Joseph Smith to help establish Nauvoo, IL, then left everything she knew and loved when Brigham Young came into power and instituted polygamy. These poems span motherhood, desire, spirituality, and what it means to take agency of your own life.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, Kelsay Books, August 2024, poetry
The poetry collection The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had chronicles the life of Enid from her upbringing on her father’s farm in the 1930s to her widowhood as a family matriarch in the latter half of the 20th century. Though she doesn’t take easily to domesticity and motherhood, Enid often loses herself in the process, but sometimes she finds herself too.
Catherine Jagoe, Praying to the God of Small Things, Kelsay Books, April 2024, poetry
The poems in Praying to the God of Small Things explore how we live with both grief and wonder in this era of climate change and environmental destruction. The author writes as a mother and an observer of neglected and endangered small creatures. The book has been described as “A fiercely sad but also ferociously celebratory collection by an attentive, eloquent, and important eco-poet, this book is a hymn for our time.”
Megan Williams, One Bad Mother: A Mother’s Search for Meaning in the Police Academy, Sibylline Press, September 2024, creative nonfiction (memoir)
After her six-year-old daughter puts a hammer through a wall, Williams decides to abandon her life as an academic and apply to the Philadelphia Police Academy. During two years of tests, she confronts her mental and physical abilities while dealing with the paralyzing fear that she is a bad mother and the real possibility that she might not make the cut at the Academy. When all is done, she makes peace with a motherhood far different from the dream sold by our culture.
Interested in reviewing one of these (or another) available book for MER? Please have a look at our Guidelines, fill out our Book Reviewer Info Form, and email us at [email protected] with the names of the top three books you’d be interested in reviewing. Thanks!