MER Bookshelf – January 2025
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Dzvinia Orlowsky, Those Absences Now Closest, Carnegie Mellon University Press, October 2024, poetry.
In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to “cut yourself with a dull razor.” She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching.
Keetje Kuipers, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, BOA Editions, April 2025, poetry.
The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with.
Lisa C. Taylor, The Shape of What Remains, Between the Lines Publishing, Liminal Press, February 2025, literary fiction (novel).
What did six-year-old Serena Calvano see that caused her to run in the road on a clear November morning while waiting for the school bus with her mother? Teresa Calvano has spent a decade blaming herself for Serena’s violent death and wishing it was her husband, Luke who was with Serena that day so the guilt didn’t fall so heavily on her shoulders. When her husband and friends lose patience with her failure to get back to life, Teresa turns to books, therapy, and Janis Joplin to address her continued unraveling. Is there a cure for grief? In Teresa’s world, her research and life as a successful English professor fail to offer the one thing she most wants: another day with her six-year-old daughter.
Mom Egg Review publishes reviews of recent books (including chapbooks) of poetry, fiction and creative prose, by mother writers, and of books focused on motherhood or women’s experiences and issues.
- If you are interested in reviewing books for us, please check out our Guidelines, and then email us at [email protected].
- If you are interested in having your book reviewed, please visit Book Review Request for more info.