MER Bookshelf
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Preeti Vangani, Fifty Mothers, River River Books, February 2026, poetry
Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker’s Bombay home. Pierced with joy, with music and sweat, traffic and smoke, the collection layers family dynamics, gender roles, and the pain and pleasure of the speaker’s body, while drawing a living, lyric line between the “gone mother” and daughter. These poems are the fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs for the grown children of mothers living in a world that takes without asking. In the keen, interwoven contexts of grief, physical pain, and lyric poetry, Vangani’s Fifty Mothers considers the variety of the phenomenal world and discovers in its living wake an abundance of taste, touch, and mothers.
Susan Finch, Dear Second Husband, Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2026, literary fiction (short stories)
Set in the rapidly changing city of Nashville, Tennessee, the characters in Dear Second Husband struggle to make their marriages, friendships, and families thrive despite the pressures of modern life. As the city grows and shifts around them, these men and women confront private losses, unspoken longings, and the quiet fractures that form within intimate relationships. An unapologetic widower, a self-destructive musician, a teacher grieving a miscarriage, and a mother trying to be everything for everyone rely on resilience and persistence to find joy and belonging in the fragile connections between one another.
Jaime Forsythe, Yield, Wolsak & Wynn, April 2026, poetry
In her third collection, Nova Scotian poet Jaime Forsythe has created an unforgettable long poem with Yield. In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum void from a porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea, and between being lost and being found, grows thinner. With repeated waves of couplets Forsythe brings the reader unforgettable images: a pom-pom that hardens into a sea urchin, an underwater dance club, a coast that melts into the sea. Delicately tracing the disorientation and dark edges of new motherhood, this is a collection that embraces beauty and ambiguity with a baby that roots for milk while what’s ancient – whether history or memory – floods in.
Ana Maria Caballero, Material, Trio House Press, May 2026, poetry
Material is a book with no place to hide, offering a mature rendering of how experience cuts as it sculpts. The unapologetic female speaker explores different ways strength manifests in the roles of artist, wife, daughter, and mother — and how recorded and parsed observation can be a form of both protest and care. In her second collection, Ana Maria Caballero delivers honest, edgy, and exquisitely crafted explorations of how we seek to balance the multiple roles and responsibilities that call to us, all the while preserving our wild, creative, imperfect selves.