MER Bookshelf – April 2025
Curated by Melissa Joplin Highley
Alice B Fogel, Falsework, Bee Monk Press, August 2024, poetry
These poems refuse sleep. They remind us that life is a cycle of filling and emptying, of finding and having and losing, and that even as hope dips out of sight like a loon, “love / in the end … might still exist.” Falsework, in construction, is a temporary but necessary form that allows what will become the lasting edifice to be built upon it, after which the support structure is disassembled and discarded. In these poems, a life is built upon the dome of a past that finally fades, while—for now—the new vault, radiating sunlight, remains.
Heather Brown Barrett, Water in Every Room, Kelsay Books, February 2025, poetry (chapbook)
Water in Every Room embodies the fluctuations of emotion and form in new motherhood. Ferocious and tender, tending and transformed, mother embraces both her child and the dualities of self in this collection of poems.
Lauren Crawford, Catch & Release, Cornerstone Press, March 2025, poetry
The book is a journey through the modern American household and family unit, a place that emphasizes the clash between millennial and boomer culture. Catch & Release describes trauma as if it is a shapeshifter; taking a different form, a different face, a different blame game for each generation with whom it tumbles. It makes a record of the beautiful while exploring the ripples of consequence, which of course magnifies the importance of patience and understanding. The words in this book are meant for healing and show how incredibly flawed that journey can be in a world where forgiveness is becoming astronomically hypocritical. In Catch & Release, nature makes a path for the speaker’s losses and shows how a person can bloom even in grief.
Su Chang, The Immortal Woman, House of Anansi, March 2025, literary fiction (novel)
A Chinese mother and daughter wrestle with the demons of their past. The mother, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. The daughter is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white love interest, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman is a generational story of heartbreak, resilience, yearning, and ultimately, hope, offering a rarely seen insider’s view of the fractured lives of the new Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind.
Susan Vespoli, Therefore, Illuminated, Kelsay Books, March 2025, poetry
Therefore, Illuminated is a memoir in verse by Susan Vespoli timelining her path back toward light following the aftermath of her son Adam’s 2022 murder by the Phoenix Police. (Note: it is a sort of sequel to her previous collection One of Them Was Mine.) One of the opening quotes in Therefore, Illuminated is Leonard Cohen’s iconic: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” The other was heard in a 12-Step meeting: “Have a good life anyway.” This is a book about having a good life anyway. The poems were formed from fodder that bubbled up during stream-of-consciousness writing circles and Wild Writing. Vespoli believes in the power of writing to heal.
Brandel France de Bravo, Locomotive Cathedral, Backwaters Press, March 2025, poetry
With wit and vulnerability, France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all the while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is 12th century Buddhist mind training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on earth.
Rosa Castellano, All Is The Telling, Diode Editions, April 2025, poetry
Transported from the poet’s Florida childhood–raised in a trailer park called Camelot by interracial parents–into the fictionalized lives of Black sisters surviving Georgia in the years after emancipation, Castellano raises a question central to her identity: what might it be like to pass as one or the other–as Black, or as white. All is the Telling will resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the complexities of identity and sought to make sense of a world that can be both brutal and tender. It is a collection that asks us to listen—to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and in that listening, find the strength to tell our own stories. For anyone who believes in the power of words to shape lives, challenge injustices, and celebrate the human spirit, this collection will not disappoint.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Abbreviate, Small Harbor Publishing, May 2025, creative nonfiction (essays)
A small collection of small essays, Abbreviate examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. In lyric flash prose, Sarah Fawn Montgomery shares a girlhood shaped by neglect and abuse from adults and saved through the communal care of fierce female friends. The essays in this collection probe the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobe with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricochet with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm. Full of stars and scars, Abbreviate examines what happens when girls and women are haunted by hunger and self-erasure, asking us to reconsider the space we make for our secrets, shames, and selves.