Splinters by Leslie Jamison You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz Review by Denise Napoli Long It’s called Divorce Memoir, but there ought to be a subcategory, Divorce Mom Memoir,…
Browsing: Book Reviews
Review by Carla Panciera L’Air du Temps is the name of a perfume and the title of Diane Josefowicz newest book, the first in a proposed trilogy. (Josefowicz’s debut novel is Ready, Set, Oh, also set in her home…
Review by Suzette Bishop Miriam Levine’s Forget about Sleep, the 2023 winner of The Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, stays with you, unguarded, blooming, fragrant, rustling. Life on Earth is paradise. And it isn’t paradise. What do we do…
Review by Sharon Tracey Fabulosa—the second poetry collection by Karen Rigby—lives up to its title, propelled by a sensory rush of cinematic color as the poet pulls us through poems as vivid as paintings, as physical as putting on…
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…
Review by Jessy Randall I first encountered the work of Erin Malone when I was on a badly-managed, amateurish, truly terrible three-person judging panel for a chapbook contest that no longer exists. Malone’s manuscript was, in my opinion, the…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Marjorie Maddox’s most recent book, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, is a (mostly) joyous celebration of prickly, eccentric visions. In 2018, Maddox tells us, she and her daughter, Anna Lee Hafer, a visual…
Rue Matthiessen Castles & Ruins—A Challenging Narrative. When I undertook to return to Ireland with my young family to try to find a castle called Annaghkeen, that I had lived near to as a child, I certainly did not…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Castles and Ruins is a quiet, ruminative memoir shifting between the narrator’s year in Ireland as a child and her return years later as an adult with her husband and six-year-old son. Rue’s father, Peter…
Review by Christina Kelly This quietly searing collection of poems by Ann E. Wallace documents the confusion, pain and terror of the Covid pandemic, beginning when she first became severely ill in March 2020. Wallace, the 2023-24 Poet Laureate…