MER Bookshelf
April 2024
Books of poetry, memoir, fiction, short stories, and an anthology on our radar…..
Sarah Ghazal Ali, Theophanies. Alice James Books, 2024. (poetry). Moving between the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, the poems in Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut, Theophanies, explore the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Matriarchs Sarai and Hajar come to life in these pages, which are also interspersed with the speaker’s own experiences of motherhood and womanhood. Theophanies arises from the speaker’s tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.
Lisa Ampleman, Mom in Space. LSU Press 2024. (poems and essays). Mom in Space is a complicated love letter to both the intergalactic and the terrestrial. Using the lens of spaceflight, Lisa Ampleman explores subjects ranging from the personal to the political, from fertility tests and parenting to climate change and civil rights. As NASA and commercial space companies gear up for Artemis missions to the moon, Mom in Space offers new conceptions of women in space, incorporating both fictional and real female astronauts, among them the first mom in space (Anna Fisher) and the first Black woman in space (Mae Jemison). With a sense of both awe and informed inquiry, Mom in Space considers what spaceflight means not just for those who get rocketed into space but for those who stay home.
Sarah W. Bartlett, Waking to Brevity FLP 2024. (chapbook).“Waking to Brevity” is Sarah W. Bartlett’s poetic love-letter to her partner, moving from their later-life marriage through the debilitating challenges of his Parkinson’s Disease. His personal story of courage, humor and determination to live and to die on his own terms, evokes the experience of many. Bartlett has laid their journey of love and loss onto the page with breathtaking honesty and beauty. Bartlett’s roots as nurturer and nurtured are reflected in her deeply sentient poetry. Her raw presence to the intricate folds of love, transition and loss are a gift to the reader, revealing us to ourselves through her profoundly honest sharing
Genevieve Betts, A New Kind of Tongue. FlowerSong Press 2023. Language—our understanding of it, its regionality, and its many intricacies—is a main theme rooted within the book’s strong sense of place, specifically between Brooklyn and the southwest. A series of centos is also braided throughout this collection that exclusively uses language from outside texts such as Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Louise Erdrich’s The Roundhouse, and Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber.” Betts reshapes the language of these texts to speak her own voice through the voices of others. This voice and her lens takes a feminist perspective with subject matter that includes motherhood, work, the political climate, and other aspects of life, revealing hidden truths alongside shared truths of these recently-lived experiences.
Rose Mary Boehm, Life Stuff Kelsay Books 2023. (poetry). This brilliant collection speaks candidly about living in the final stretch of one’s time. Rose writes about aging, the pending inevitable, the changing world, friendship and family, the meaning of home. She meanders down memory lane, from Peru to Paris to Spain to Germany. These gorgeous poems speak about regrets and losses with rare honesty. In a way, this collection from a prolific and gifted writer is her love letter to us, something for us to keep, to keep her close. This is a writer who knows that the darkness and most painful parts of life hold as much wealth as the sweetest. And this is her magnum opus.—Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review, author, The Rope Artist, Winter in June
Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh, Zan. Dzanc Books, June 2024. (fiction, short stories). Zan is a debut short story collection by Iranian-American author Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh (trade paper, 6/11). Zan won our 2021 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize. What drew me to it immediately is the range of experience Suzi’s sharing: stories of a university student who strips off her hijab in the streets of Tehran and films herself as part of a daring protest movement; of a wealthy Iranian woman living in Atlanta who maintains a secret life as a burlesque dancer; of a teenager who slips out of a hotel room at night to skinny dip in the toxic Caspian Sea; of an Iranian lesbian who agonizes over her coming out and her father’s subsequent attempts to re-educate her. These are some of the many windows Zan opens into the complex lives of Iranian women today–those who continue to suffer oppression under the Islamic Republic, those who are crafting new identities in America, and those who hover somewhere in between.
Ashley Honeysett, Fictions, U Miami Press May 2024, (fiction), is a metafictional look at the life and struggles of artist-mothers. When turmoil erupts in her private life, a struggling writer learns that her real-world problems have begun to cross over into her work, leading to a quest to better understand herself as an artist. Told in a fragmentary style that blurs the line between reality and imagination, Fictions considers the everyday tolls—the personal as much as the aesthetic—of getting our longings onto the page.
Talya Jankovits girl woman wife mother, Kelsay Books May 2024. (poetry). girl woman wife mother is an exploration of the complexities and nuances of the emotional and physical metamorphoses of a woman. The beauty of being a woman is found in the intricate and sometimes mundane details of the human experience and the varying demands of societal and personal pressures. Within the inhabitation of all these blurred roles is a beautiful chaos. This collection of poems tracks the effects of such roles, internal and external, homing in on the vulnerabilities of femininity and embracing them with unfiltered honesty.
Tricia Knoll, Wild Apples. Fernwood Press 2024. (poetry). Wild Apples are hard fruits left in abandoned orchards. Like rock walls, a symbol of New England where poet Tricia Knoll found a home in the Vermont woods just before the pandemic locked down. She begins the book with downsizing to make her move. Then her poems tell of both loneliness and wonder at the birth of grandsons who live just down the road and the wildlife that moves through her five acres of land.
Lara Lillibridge, The Truth About Unringing Phones. Unsolicited Press 2024. (essays). When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
Marjorie Moorhead, Every Small Breeze. Kelsay Books 2023.
The poems in Marjorie Moorhead’s Every Small Breeze are attuned to weather and seasons, both those in the concrete world and in each person’s interior realm. As I spend time with these poems, I feel in the presence of a friend who takes me with her on a walk through grief and its antidote. “Make sure to crane my neck, raise my gaze,” she instructs herself, “notice, locate, love.” This is a human and humane collection which carries us into emptiness but directs us toward joy.—Diane Seuss
Andrea O’Reilly, Fiona Joy Green, and Victoria Bailey, Editors, Coming into Being: Mothers on Finding and Realizing Feminism. (Demeter Press 2023). (anthology). Coming into Being: Mothers on Finding and Realizing Feminism, is a groundbreaking anthology that explores how becoming and being a mother can be shaped by, and interconnected with, how mothers realize feminism and/or become feminists. For many women and mothers, the pieces included in this anthology—which range from personal essays to academic work, to creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and interviews—marks a seismic and long-awaited recognition of how mothering is not at odds with feminism, but one of the most powerful extensions of it. Many people will find perspective in this extraordinary book, especially during this time in history, where the ideas of mothering and motherhood have been co-opted as an extension of oppressive values. With brilliance and heart, Coming into Being affords all mothers (“‘mother’ [referring]to any individual who engages in motherwork; it is not limited to cis-gender women”) a synergetic vantage point from which to find solidarity and strength.
Meg Pokrass, First Law of Holes. Dzanc Books 2024. (fiction-short stories).
First Law of Holes delivers a stunning selection of stories from the past fourteen years of Meg’s career. A sixteen-year-old transplanted Pennsylvanian navigates sunburn and heartbreak in equal measure while falling in love with a very tan ghost. A girl with drunk scribbles on her shoes searches for fragments of an old flame inside the boy at the mall food court. And a female circus contortionist, daughter of a failed clown, comes to terms with the first law of romantic relationships: Once in a hole, stop digging.
Shannon Robinson, The Ill-Fitting Skin, Press 53, May 2024 (fiction, short stories). Winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. The stories in The Ill-Fitting Skin lean into the fantastical and deal with themes of female rage, bodily autonomy, motherhood, and failed nurturing. “Florence Nightingale was a cannibal” – so declares one of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman. I’ve turned this phrase over in my mind countless times since I first read it as a teenager. Now that I’m older, and a mother, I understand emotional hunger and destructive impulses in a new way: these are themes I return to again and again in my writing. If women are synonymous with nurturing, who are we if we botch the job of caring for others? How do we care for ourselves if we are socialized against our own interests?
Lauren Shapiro, BRID. Veliz Books, February 1, 2024. (poetry). In BRID by Lauren Shapiro, a narrator grappleswith the meaning of language, art, and poetry, and its place in a world where “death is random. Andlike / an arrow fashioned from / your own bone,sometimes / it comes straight from the hand / of your love.” With vulnerability and deadpan humor, these poems explore motherhood, the dissolution of a marriage, and grief through the lens of a shrinking pandemic space. Structurally expansive, Shapiro uses narrative prose, lyric poems, and photographs taken during quarantine to deliver a powerful third collection that shows the devastating and impactful aftermath of changing relationships—between family members, couples, and even to oneself.
Chika Unigwe, The Middle Daughter. Dzanc Books, 2024. (fiction). The Middle Daughter by award-winning author Chika Unigwe, being released in paperback (3/12). The Middle Daughter is a modern reimagining of the myth of Hades and Persephone that follows the story of Nani, a seventeen-year-old whose world is completely upended after the death of her older sister and father. Left alone to navigate her pain while her mother and sister grieve, she finds solace in the arms of a handsome preacher who is not the savior he seems. As life goes on, Nani finds herself estranged from her family and caught up in an abusive relationship, torn between the longing for freedom and the love for her children. Faced with the need to escape, Nani must risk it all to save what matters most to her.