MER Bookshelf – August 2025
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Suzanne Kamata, River of Dolls and Other Stories, Penguin Random House SEA, January 2025, literary fiction (short stories)
These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales and lore, explore the lives of individuals caught between desire and duty, as well as the conflicting expectations of different cultures. For example, in “Day Pass,” a college student in South Carolina befriends a female prisoner on a work release program, thinking that she will be a good influence, but then realizes that she has gotten in over her head. The narrator of “Down the Mountain,” a descendant of the Heike clan, recounts the tragic life and death of her beloved sister as she urges her own daughter to leave their secluded mountain village and go out into the world, and in the title story, “River of Dolls,” a Japanese woman struggles with infertility. Ranging from dirty to magical realism, the stories collected here are often infused with humor, while exposing universal truths.
Katy E. Ellis, Forty Bouts in the Wilderness, MoonPath Press, March 2025, poetry
Forty Bouts in the Wilderness unfolds layers of memory that cascade from experiences related to early childhood patriarchal religious indoctrination, the near-death of a parent, miscarriage, and a daughter’s search for home in her own motherhood. The title poem of this collection “Forty Bouts in the Wilderness” is a hybrid long poem containing 40 tercets or “bouts,” some with corresponding prose poems that act as footnotes which themselves tell a story. The collection as a whole considers how new experiences can re-ignite initial trauma which may ultimately lead to healing or, at least, a new way to enfold our past and our personal faith into our daily lives.
Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love, HarperOne, April 2025, creative nonfiction (memoir)
When she endures a string of life-threatening pregnancy losses and rare medical complications, Rebecca Thompson discovers that being a doctor does little to protect her from feeling isolated and overwhelmed. What she longs for is a community of women—or even one encouraging story—to reassure her that she isn’t alone. Held Together is her response to that unmet need. Seeking out the extraordinary stories of ordinary women, Dr. Thompson collaborates with friends, patients, and medical colleagues to explore their most intimate reflections on motherhood, from how they become parents to how their families grow and change as they face challenges far beyond those early years. Through experiences ranging from the universal to the nearly unimaginable, these brave, resilient women navigate devastations and triumphs, moments of hope and wonder, and, sometimes, grief that threatens to consume them—until joy emerges in unexpected places.
Ellen Stone, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them, Mayapple Press, April 2025, poetry
If poetry is a container, a place to gather what keeps us alive, what feeds our joy, and eases our sorrow, it is a communal basket, and it is often held by women. Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is a collection of poems exploring what women hold, what they keep, and how they release— sorrow, loss and grief. Using the natural world as buffer, Ellen Stone writes poems exploring motherhood and mental illness, sexual assault, marriage and parenthood—as well as how loss filters down through family generations. The poems investigate daughters leaving home while trying to carry home within them. The moon is the mother in the book, waxing and waning, but always there, always coming back around.
Susan Michele Coronel, In the Needle, A Woman, Finishing Line Press, July 2025, poetry
In her award-winning debut collection In the Needle, A Woman, Susan Michele Coronel weaves together strands of challenging life experiences, including the complexities of the mother-daughter bond, divorce, family losses, and her Jewish ancestors’ traumatic past. Through captivating imagery and the lyrical imagination that accompanies us from childhood through adolescence and adulthood, In the Needle, A Woman culminates in the speaker’s life as an independent woman with her own desires and needs. Through it all, the healing power of poetry helps her to mend the torn fabric of her life and to find purpose, creating a durable framework that bridges generations, traditions, and norms.
Holli Carrell, Apostasies, Perugia Press, September 2025, poetry
Holli Carrell’s debut collection Apostasies explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. Interweaving prose, documentary poems, translations, erasures, and spare, imagistic lyrics, Apostasies aims to recover and reclaim the body by its own definition. Casting her experience within the broader narrative of Mormonism, Carrell unpacks the fraught history of gender and polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormonism, exposing the sexual predation and grooming tactics used by Joseph Smith—Mormonism’s founder—on his thirty-three “wives,” many of whom were fourteen to eighteen years old at the time of their marriage. Courageous and defiant, the poems in Apostasies ultimately celebrate doubt and disobedience; they challenge oppressive constructions of womanhood and cisnormativity, in particular rejecting motherhood, “obedience,” and religious traditions that vilify independent thought and bodily autonomy.
Merilyn Simonds, Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend, Penguin Random House Canada, September 2025, creative nonfiction (essays)
Walking with Beth unfolds in a series of short, intimate “conversations” that took place during three years of weekly walks prompted by the author’s passage into 70—which coincided with Beth’s 100th birthday. Now Beth Robinson is 104, one of almost 10,000 Canadians over 100. Beth—the daughter of Lorne Pierce, the Ryerson Press editor who first nurtured Canada’s national literature, and niece of early suffragette-feminist Alice Chown—is a remarkable guide into older age: she worked until she was 97; drove until she was 103; and still spends her days making art. In Walking with Beth, Simonds shares these intimate exchanges, delving into corners of older women’s lives that are rarely seen or spoken about so openly. As Simonds looks forward into a future that seems unknowable, Beth looks back, offering her experience in surviving the later-life blows that batter us all, and more importantly, her wisdom about how to enrich every passing day.
Ann Cavolic, Count On Me, Guernica Editions, October 2025, literary fiction (novel)
Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents’ bank account, house, and medical decisions. As Tia uncovers the harm to her parents and tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Filled with insight and humour amid hardship, this is a story about how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money, what it takes to break cycles across generations, and how human relationships can rise above the transactional.