MER Bookshelf – August 2026
Sarah Jefferis, Lucky to Have You, Finishing Line Press, May 2026, poetry
Lucky to Have You is a collection of narrative lyric poems that meditate on romantic loss and love. Loss and luck are synonymous; luck always appears amid heartbreak, and in moments of unexpected luck, aged sorrow rears its wrinkled forehead. The collection comprises three sections: “Lucky to Find You,” “Lucky to Keep You,” and “Lucky to Lose You.” These imitation love poems travel up and down the East Coast- from Virginia to New York- and shadow all kinds of marriages that died under the weight of addiction and infidelity, or power dynamics across religious assaults, or the possibility of first dates, or the stalled gift of situationships, or deep, authentic interracial love swamped in an America that refuses to face its own history. Turning community rejection on its head, questioning her own privileges, this narrator arrives somewhat intact, having survived early intimate violence. Residue is revelation. Yet, she remains hopeful, grounded in the triad of luck, love, and loss, ready to get back up again.
Ann LoLordo, Materfamilias, Finishing Line Press, June 2026, poetry (chapbook)
The poems in Materfamilias reach back through a family’s history to illuminate the lives of women: relationships between mothers and daughters, the stories told, choices made, and, ultimately, shared, for better or worse. In images mysterious and taut, they investigate a particular inheritance of desire and loss, opportunity and worth, marriage and motherhood—a legacy that reveals a troubling truth.
Lee Desrosiers, Pocketing the Light, Kelsay Books, July 2026, poetry
Octavio Quintanilla writes: Lee Desrosiers’s poems ask what it means to inhabit a life that is always changing, a life that keeps asking us to name the things we lose in time: a mother’s voice, a father’s laughter, “grass / bowing to its wildness.” These poems move through meditations on illness and aging and move through beautiful observations of nature: “Nature is a balm to me even though / I don’t know the names of all the flowers,” Desrosiers writes, and this quiet confession becomes the emotional center of a book attentive to a living world we are part of and holds us until we are ready to let go.
Mansi Dahal, Women in Marigold, Stillhouse Press, September 2026, poetry
Wilting coriander, etched steel plates, and long, dark hair spread on a beauty parlor floor—Women in Marigold is intimacy over a kitchen sink and sheer evidence of presence. At its center is the ache of dislocation and the desire for rootedness, captured in a single, impossible wish: “Imagine being able to live / in one place at one time.” Interrogating what we inherit, Women in Marigold moves from Kathmandu to New York City, from Saeeda Bai to Sylvia Plath, confronting the tension between life as a daughter in Nepal and a future as an artist in America. The book has received advance praise from Diane Seuss, Bhanu Kapil, Dorothea Lasky, and Timothy Donnelly.
Amy Dryansky, Ambergris, Pine Row Press, September 2026, poetry
In her third collection of poems, Ambergris, Amy Dryansky explores illness, family, motherhood, and the natural world. Dryansky zeroes in on our shared “creative project”— the continual making, re-making and unmaking we’re engaged in as we reckon with our past, present and future. What do we do with what we’re given? How do we respond when what we’re given isn’t what we want or think we can manage? These poems have honesty and grit, bite and sting, but they have beauty, too, and always, always, the glimmer of possibility.
Jen Karetnick, Organ Language, Lit Fox Books, September 2026, poetry
In 2023, poet Jen Karetnick’s then-22-year-old son donated a living kidney to his childhood friend. The poems that arose from that bonding experience between two young men form the loose narrative of Organ Language. Written in a variety of free verse, received forms, and invented forms, the book also explores the functions of and diseases that affect all sorts of human organs, from brain to skin to tongue, as well as the organisms that this Miami-based poet encounters in her quotidian, subtropical environment. Poems in Organ Language won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize and the Press 53 Poem Summer Challenge, and placed in competitions sponsored by Bacopa Literary Review, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, The MacGuffin, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. They’ve appeared in journals including NELLE, New Ohio Review, North Dakota Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere.
Jen Siraganian, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, Perugia Press, September 2026
In her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, Jen Siraganian traces a self shaped by history, fragmentation, and memory as she weaves her family’s past in the Middle East with her identity as an Armenian-American woman and mother. Whether portraying a grandparent’s survival during the Armenian Genocide, a father’s childhood in 1940s Palestine, or a son’s birth when “death is a neighbor,” Siraganian’s poems interrogate concepts of home, origins, belonging, and displacement. Using a docupoetic lens, the poet braids narratives with archival photographs and artifacts to chart cycles of cultural and historic erasure while enacting an intertextual conversation with artists of the diaspora, and with art itself. Through poems that seed each other with recurring images of pomegranates, mushrooms, and fire, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead pushes against annihilation with a voice that resists silence.
Natalie Baszile, Friends and Family, Pamela Dorman Books, October 2026, literary fiction (novel)
From the author of Queen Sugar, a piercing examination of friendship and loyalty as two best friends find themselves at odds over their beliefs on race, identity and allyship, especially when it comes to their teenage children. Babs and Nora have spent a decade’s worth of morning walks sharing family secrets, local drama, and advice—everything from tips on lingerie choices to Babs’s suggestions to Nora, a white woman, on how to raise Nathan, her adopted Black son. But their worlds are turned upside down when the cops are called on their kids while they’re home alone, leading to a traumatic police encounter for Nathan. In the aftermath, Babs and Nora find themselves divided as never before, and Nathan looks for refuge with Babs and her family, where, unlike in his own home, race, identity, and culture are always up for discussion. Set in a tight-knit enclave in the Bay Area, Friends and Family is an eye-opening exploration of friendship and privilege, race and community, and what it means to truly be a good friend and ally.
Jacqueline Kolosov, Motherhood, and the Places Between, Iron Oak Press, October 2026, creative nonfiction (essays)
There is a place most women know but few books inhabit: the space between who you were before and who you are becoming. Between daughter and mother. Between hope and grief. Jacqueline Kolosov has written her way through that place with honesty, intelligence, and prose of rare beauty. In essays that range from the West Texas plains to the gardens of London to the cliffs of St. Ives, she traces the years in which she underwent fertility treatment, suffered a miscarriage, raised a young daughter, watched her parents age, helped a dying colleague navigate a university hallway, and sat at the bedside of a friend whose cancer would not relent. These are lyric essays about loss, but more than that, they are about the forms of attention that make loss survivable: a Cassatt pastel glimpsed in childhood, a horse’s warm flank beneath a cold morning sky, a daughter’s hand in hers at the edge of the sea. Searching, tender, and deeply alive, Motherhood, and the Places Between is the book readers will press into the hands of the women they love most.