MER Bookshelf – July 2025
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Catherine Gigante-Brown, Immigrant Hearts, Volossal, March 2025, literary fiction (novel
Immigrant Hearts is a vintage love story that stretches across more than 40 years, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Antonio and Luisa are two lonely Italian garment industry workers who meet by chance in the wilds of Brooklyn. These gentle souls build a life together, chasing dreams, weathering loss, finding refuge in the beauty of opera, books and each other. Inspired by true events, richly imagined by the author. The first part is told from the POV of the couple and their mothers, with roots in America as well as in Italy.
Kelly Fordon, What Trammels the Heart, SFAPress, June 2025, poetry
Anyone who has seen the film Spotlight will find a powerful poetic companion in this poetry collection. What Trammels the Heart casts new light on the clergy cover-up and grapples with the assaults that abruptly ended so many childhoods and ruined so many lives. Compounding the devastation of the pedophilia scandals was the later confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the ascension of the religious right. While a parent’s complicity might be the most shattering companion piece within this text, the author ultimately attains a semblance of personal redemption while honoring the testimony of the victims and challenging centuries of entrenched religious abuse.
Diane Elayne Dees, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, Kelsay Books, June 2025, poetry (chapbook)
This collection of poems, which includes both formal and free verse, explores the trauma and confusion experienced when a troubled marriage finally dissolves. Issues of loneliness, anger, damaged self-image, and dissociation are all woven into the poems. The metaphors that tie the poems together involve everything from gardening to house decorating to playing tennis and pushing a weighted sled. The chapbook contains a sonnet crown which illustrates how trauma leads to both fragmentation and self-realization, as the poet comes to understand what has happened to her as she searches “for all the parts that fell away.”
Susan McCaslin, Named and Nameless, Inanna Publications, July 2025, poetry
In this new collection of poetry, Susan McCaslin explores the meaning and significance of identity and all that can be found in a name, or, lack thereof. Mixing the personal with the societal, McCaslin explores her own past and women’s continued role in child-rearing. This dreamlike series of encounters with nature and the divine invites deep reflection through re-discovering the familiar. Her joyful wordplay invites us to notice the tiniest details and contemplate the divine.
Samina Najmi, Sing Me a Circle, Trio House Press, October 2025, creative nonfiction (essays)
“All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center.” These exquisite personal essays trace the orbit of author Samina Najmi as she reflects on events, people, and places that shape her vision of the world. Whether she finds herself in Pakistan, England, or the United States, she keeps her family and her love of stories firmly at the center of her life. As Najmi navigates the process of forging her identity as a professor and mother, her extended family inspires, haunts, and stirs her to action. Through sorrows and singing, questions and growth, she passes along a centering love of family and beauty to her children. And like the unsung writers in her family, Najmi seeks home in time and on the page.
Shigeko Ito, The Pond Beyond the Forest: Reflections on Childhood Trauma & Motherhood, She Writes Press, October 2025, creative nonfiction (essays)
At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her. Until it wasn’t. Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family. In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage.
Margo LaPierre, Ajar, Guernica, October 2025, poetry
From award-winning writer and editor Margo LaPierre, Ajar offers an exuberant first-person account of psychosis and bipolar disorder that goes beyond the binary. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, these poems measure it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry, and navigating the monstrous physical and psychological dangers of womanhood. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis, emphasizing the auspicious outcomes of neurodiverse cognition.
Diane Botnick, Becoming Sarah, She Writes Press, October 2025, literary fiction (novel)
Sarah Vogel invented herself. She had no choice. Born in Auschwitz to a mother who died, and sustained by numerous other women out of sheer will and hope, Sarah has no roots or history she can remember. Liberated at age three, adopted at six, Sarah goes on to live a determined, practical existence. She loves her daughters but is tough; she knows the world is tough. To navigate it, she lets people believe the life story she tells. Better to have a past than none, right? Told in multiple voices, and spanning 1945 into the near future, this story of generations of women struggling to understand their history, each other, and themselves is rich, moving, compelling, and unconventionally told—because Sarah is unconventional, her own construct, both a wonder and a concern, yet in the end, finally, herself.
Kerry Neville, Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir, Madville Publishing, October 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
Momma May Be Mad: A Memoir is an inventive and striking memoir about motherhood, madness, and the grace of second and third chances. Kerry Neville shares the story of how she was caught in the perfect storm of bipolar disorder, anorexia, and alcoholism when her children were young and her marriage failing and how she found her way back to joy and hope. Electric shock therapy, hospitalizations, and even an exorcism were desperate, if failed, lifelines. But even in that dark chaos, she held fast to an abiding belief in love and fought to regain her own life and her life with her children.