Welcome to MER Bookshelf, a listing featuring noteworthy new and recent books by our contributors, community members, and the literary world at large that share a focus on motherhood and women’s lives. Selected 2022 Poetry Releases of Note Theresa…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein Suzanne Farrell Smith’s astonishing new essay collection is a quick read but a long contemplation; even the shortest pieces stayed with me long after I’d closed the book’s (gorgeous) cover. The structure is not chronological.…
Review by Laura Dennis Sita, a young Indian-American anthropology graduate who writes copy for MetLife, marries Pierre, a French-Vietnamese businessman. His work takes them to Norway, where she struggles to adapt, despite or perhaps because she has a talking…
Review by Jane Ward In Circling Flight is the first novel by Jane Harrington, short story author and professor of English at Washington & Lee University. In 2019, the manuscript was awarded the Brighthorse Prize, an honor which included…
Review by Emily Webber In Zoe Ballering’s short story collection, There Is Only Us, each of the eight speculative fiction stories is surprising, funny, and thought-provoking. In stories spread across time—biblical times, pandemic times, future worlds—Ballering’s characters often face…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Elizabeth Strauss Friedman writes in her title, “Lost Positive (Centaurus Constellation—Centaur),” Untamed| As women ought to be, life outside male invalidation advertently galloping into stardust. In her latest collection, The Lost Positive, Constellation Poems, Strauss…
Review by Hester L. Furey Nicole Callihan’s new book This Strange Garment delivers a stunning sequence of poems about the experience of breast cancer. A survivor myself, I selected the book for the theme, remembering Audre Lorde’s insistence that…
Review by Sherre Vernon Lisa C. Taylor is the author of two collections of short fiction, Impossibly Small Spaces (Arlen House, 2018) and Growing a New Tail (Arlen House, 2015), as well as five collections of poetry including Interrogation…
Review by Jennifer Martelli I’ve come to love the epistolary form, which is defined as literary work that reads as a letter or letters. Relationships are laid out on a surgeon’s table, emotions revealed through the mechanisms…
Review by Jane Ward In Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, award-winning short story writer and poet Carla Panciera presents a deeply moving collection of nineteen standalone stories that, read as a whole, pay tribute to the years she…