MER Bookshelf – March 2025
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Lynn McGee, Science Says Yes, Broadstone Books, January 2025, poetry
Science Says Yes by Lynn McGee addresses human empathy and resilience in relation to nature, advances in technology and the perplexing dynamics of a world hurtling toward its own apocalypse. The poems invite the reader to resist isolation and expand their capacity for kindness towards themselves and the environment. Each poem’s title is a headline which was searched out and matched to the poem after it was written. This adds unexpected layers of meaning and speaks to the impact of today’s relentless news cycle. Overall, the collection asserts that the answers to humanity’s biggest challenges are found in the small miracles of daily life. It’s a reflection on power and progress that asks us to honor our own capacity to evolve
Claudia M Reder, Dizzying Words, Main Street Rag, January 2025, poetry
When I first got nonstop vertigo, I was raising a young child. The poems in Dizzying Words reveal the complexity of this situation. Out of necessity, my daughter became my gatekeeper. My husband commuted to work long-distance. I could no longer mother the way I had wanted to. I couldn’t work. I had recently completed a Ph.D.. How do you care for a child when you can’t function? How does the child grow up and not resent her mother? Many of these poems are about my relationship with my daughter. Other themes include: What is identity? What is healing when you don’t heal? What happens to the mother-writer when she can’t write? What is metaphor when your language is lost in word-finding and brain fog?
Kimberly Ann Priest, tether & lung, Texas Review Press, February 2025, poetry
Set in rural Michigan, tether & lung embraces a level of honest sensuality and vulnerability as a heterosexual woman grapples with the needs of her own body while her closeted homosexual husband seeks solace in the animals he loves—his horses. Here, compassion and contempt face each other, asking difficult questions concerning gender, alienation, child-rearing, domestic violence, and divorce.
Janet MacFadyen, State of Grass, Salmon Poetry, February 2025, poetry
State of Grass deals with recovered memory, childhood sexual abuse, depression, and speaking out. The poems move from immobilizing childhood silence into memory. Peat bogs, cicada husks, and abandoned towns reveal their histories in a process that speaks to loyalties and power played out in the domestic arena. The book begins with the mother’s depression and subsequently the daughter’s; and then segues into the father’s abuse. Later it becomes an exploration of historical trauma, the desire to understand why such things happen, not just that they do. The powerful, unacknowledged dynamics between parent and child, husband and wife are compassionately and deeply explored in this story of human failings, love, and resilience.
Jamie Wendt, Laughing in Yiddish, Broadstone Books, February 2025, poetry
Laughing in Yiddish takes readers to the shtetls of Russia’s Pale of Settlement to look through various windows into the lives of Jewish women. Through persona and ekphrastic poems, readers meet cigarette makers, young mothers, rebellious children, shoemakers, and union laborers, some of whom are photographed as part of ethnographer S. An-Sky’s Russian expedition from 1912-1914. In addition, many of the characters in these persona poems are Wendt’s ancestors who emigrated to Chicago from the Pale of Settlement in the late nineteenth century, escaping religious persecution and economic hardships. These poems explore Jewish roots and culture in Chicago as well as the struggle of assimilation while holding on to tradition. At the heart of Laughing in Yiddish is a yearning for belonging to an ancient community and finding connection with spiritual ancestors.
Kyce Bello, Far Country, University of Nevada Press, March 2025, poetry
In her second collection of poems, Kyce Bello attempts to explore the unknowable—a landscape transformed by climate change, motherhood turned into crucible, the veils fluttering between the living and dead. “Far Country” refers to a place of spiritual exile, longing, and return. It is the future we are hurtling towards, and the foreign, disoriented present. It is the ground we stand upon when we have lost our bearings. The poems in Far Country document a journey through an unmapped territory in which loss—of the beloved earth, of a struggling daughter, of certainty and ease—becomes a medium for deepening connection and love.
Rouhangiz Karachi, Silence and Lost Words, Mage Publishers, March 2025, poetry
Silence and Lost Words is a selection of poetry of Rouhangiz Karachi, a contemporary Persian poet and scholar. Her four poetry collections in Persian depict women’s social struggles and internal tensions. For over forty years, Karachi’s scholarly work has also focused on Iranian women, poets and protagonists alike. With the insightful perspective of a poet, and the skill of a scholar, Karachi’s “woman” appears universal. Mojdeh Bahar’s marvelous translations make this collection as accessible to a casual fan of poetry as to a comparative literature scholar.
Barbara Presnell, Otherwise I’m Fine: A Memoir, University of South Carolina Press, April 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
When her husband Bill died in 1969, Tina Presnell gathered her three children. “We won’t talk about this,” she said. “It will be easier that way.” In 2012, several years after her mother’s death, Barbara Presnell recovered her father’s World War II belongings: a scrapbook, news clippings, documents, and letters. Recalling how much his war experiences had meant to him, Barbara, along with her estranged brother and sister, planned a journey to travel their father’s route through Europe. From Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, to the western bank of the Elbe River in Magdeburg, Germany, the siblings would follow the movements of their father’s division and rediscover his stories, share memories, and renew family bonds.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel, The Fun Times Brigade, Book*hug Press, May 2025, literary fiction (novel)
Amy is a new mother, navigating the fog of those bewildering early days and struggling with a role she feels ill-prepared for. It’s the first time in a decade that she hasn’t been living the busy life of a successful children’s musician, and her sense of self is unravelling. To make matters worse, her former bandmates have seemingly abandoned her. The Fun Times Brigade examines the enduring challenges of reconciling being an artist with being a mother, and how we ultimately fail and find the need to forgive those we love. It is also a timely reflection on what it really means to have a good life in a world that demands we have—and be—it all, and asserts that amidst the chaos, we can find our way back to our genuine selves.
Ellen Austin-Li, Incidental Pollen, Madville Publishing, May 2025, poetry
Incidental Pollen refers to pollen that collects on bees as they forage for nectar—like the cumulative life experiences we cannot help but carry. The hive serves as a thematic thread in this collection that explores the space between past and present, shame and redemption, grief and resilience. Poetic forms lend meaning—like the villanelle that captures the grief-driven magical thinking of the speaker. Are recurring red fox sightings visitations from her deceased father and nephew? Trauma and loss appear in these tonally rich and imagistic poems, but the arc ultimately centers on the search for belonging, the attempt to recreate home.
Marty Ross-Dolen, Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter’s Search for Truth, She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster, May 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
In her genre-bending, grandmother-mother-daughter memoir, Ross-Dolen mixes ‘wisps’—long and short form prose, photos, erasure poetry, and letters—to explore the tragic deaths of her grandparents and the difficulty of growing up with a mother suffering from protracted grief. The fragmented, non-linear narrative reflects Marty’s journey grappling with intergenerational trauma. Marty’s family founded the iconic Highlights for Children magazine. In 1960, on their way from Columbus, Ohio, to New York City for meetings about newsstand placement, her grandparents were killed in an airline disaster involving the collision of two commercial jets. Marty’s mother was fourteen. In this haunting, loving, and moving memoir, Marty Ross-Dolen pays tribute to a remarkable woman she never knew and lays bare the ways in which grief shapes us all.
Jen Michalski, All This Can Be True, Keylight Books, June 2025, literary fiction (novel)
When Lacie Johnson’s husband, Derek, suffers a stroke at forty-seven and falls into a coma, her plans come to a screeching halt—asking Derek for a divorce, going back to school to get her master’s, and starting over as a single woman now that their children have grown up. But what begins as a disaster brings an unexpected blessing in the form of Quinn, a kind stranger whom Lacie meets in the halls of the hospital. Lacie thinks she’s discovered in Quinn the life and the person she’s always wanted. But Quinn harbors a secret that connects her to Derek. And if Derek wakes up, Quinn must come clean and risk destroying her growing relationship with Lacie.