Review by Carole Mertz Composed around its title’s theme, Braving the Body formed when Editor Callihan addressed the issue of her breast cancer in 2020. After she issued This Strange Garment (Terrapin Books, 2023), she felt the urge to…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Lara Lillibridge DeMisty D. Bellinger’s short story collection, All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, just released by University of Nebraska Press, won the Barbara DiBernard Award, an annual prize for a book published by Zero Street and named…
Review by Celia Jeffries This is the first book I have read that opens with a Content Warning. I should not have been surprised; we live in a world where the evening news should come with a content warning.…
Review by Sarah Walker Caron I never considered myself a feminist. Even as I parented outside the confines of what mother is “supposed” to look like, I didn’t apply feminism to what I was doing. That all changed when…
MER Bookshelf – September 2024 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Jennifer Lang, Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses, Vine Leaves Press, October 2024, creative nonfiction (memoir) American-born Jennifer traces her journey—both on and off the yoga mat—reckoning…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader Hollay Ghadery is the author of a memoir, Fuse, recipient of a Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir; a collection of poetry, Rebellion Box; and, most recently, a short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press,…
Review by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson Deborah Leipziger’s first full-length collection, Story and Bone, brims with the lyric enthusiasm of one intrigued with word play and musicality as it follows the long tradition of mining one’s own life for inspiration.…
Review by Jessica de Koninck With a keen eye for the ironic and with dark humor, A Temporary Dwelling (Spuyten Duyvil Press), Jiwon Choi’s third poetry collection, engages deeply with impermanence and loss. Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher…
Review by Deborah Leipziger Fierce and gentle, Anne Elezabeth Pluto’s poems in How Many Miles to Babylon hold all of the essentials of life: love, death, memory, and books. In this powerful collection, the poet dances with the dead,…
A Literary Reflection by Ellen Meeropol I approached reading this novel with the mixed emotions I feel when beginning any novel set in the activism of the 1960s. With fascination, because my world view and personhood was formed in…