MER Bookshelf – December 2024
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Megan Merchant & Luke Johnson, A Slow Indwelling, Harbor Editions, November 2024, poetry.
This unique collaborative work explores parenthood, illness, and the beauty found in life’s fragile moments through a series of lyrical epistolary poems. Praised for its lush language and emotional depth, A Slow Indwelling is a must-read for poetry lovers.
Adelle Purdham, I Don’t Do Disability & Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, Dundurn Press, November 2024, creative nonfiction (essays)
A raw and intimate portrait of family, love, life, relationships, and disability parenting through the eyes of a mother to a daughter with Down syndrome. The candid essays in I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself glimmer with humanity and passion, and explore ideas of motherhood, disability, and worth. Purdham delves into grief, rage, injustice, privilege, female friendship, marriage, and desire in a voice that is loudly empathetic, unapologetic, and true. While examining the dichotomies inside of herself, she leads us to consider the flaws in society, showing us the beauty, resilience, chaos, and wild within us all.
Jennifer Martelli, Psychic Party Under the BottleTree, Lily Poetry Review Books, December 2024, poetry
Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree explores the daily reprieve from active addiction, when the sober days have become decades. In poems inspired by visual art, the speaker examines her own life as a mother, adult daughter, partner, writer, and most importantly, a recovering person. Following a circular, seasonal arc reflected by images of snakes, the zodiac, and constellations, the poems examine the hearts of obsession and loneliness. “That’s the fear,” Jennifer Martelli writes, “I’m left. I’m just left.” This collection begins in this fear, but ends with the question, “Today, what is it I must attend to with love?”
Zeeva Bukai, The Anatomy of Exile, Delphinium Books, January 2025, literary fiction (novel)
The Abadi Family saga begins when a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story between a Palestinian and a Jew ends in predictable tragedy. The family flees to America to mend, but encounters only more turmoil that threatens to tear the family apart. This powerful debut novel explores Tamar Abadi’s struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.
Nancy Gerber, Language Like Water: Poems, Finishing Line Press, November 2024, poetry (chapbook)
The poems in Language Like Water speak to conflicts, challenges, and connections in a daughter’s relationship with her mother over the span of a lifetime. The poems resonate with longing and struggle as the daughter seeks to understand and restore her complicated mother, an enigmatic figure who struggles with depression. Ultimately the daughter recognizes her own strengths as she acknowledges and inscribes moments and memories of sharing and connection.