Review by Emily Webber When reading Flood, Christine Kalafus’s debut memoir, there’s a constant feeling of being pulled by raging waters, swept up into something you can’t control, the feeling of waters rising and rising, and you can’t…
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Review by Lara Lillibridge Skip It, Spice Girls, vanilla body spray, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and frosted eyeshadow. “We’ve grown up when being captured on-screen is still a novelty.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery captures all of the desperation, longing, and…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason Jamie Wendt is an award-winning poet, a prolific book reviewer, and a middle school teacher based in Chicago. Her latest collection of poetry, Laughing in Yiddish, was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize…
Review by Kate Lewis With Body, Nina B. Lichtenstein Explores the Physical Contours of Self Navigating through explorations of a body allow author Nina B. Lichtenstein’s memoir, Body: My Life In Parts, to bring together the entirety of…
An Interview with Jocelyn Jane Cox, Author of Motion Dazzle, a Memoir of Motherhood, Loss and Skating on Thin Ice. Interview by Sara Weiss In her debut memoir Motion Dazzle, former competitive figure skater and coach Jocelyn Jane Cox…
MER Bookshelf – August 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Suzanne Kamata, River of Dolls and Other Stories, Penguin Random House SEA, January 2025, literary fiction (short stories) These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales…
Review by Rebecca Jane Mothersalt shines a light on moments of awe, ambivalence, disorientation, surprise, and power that arise with pregnancy, labor, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caring for babies. These poems reveal a woman aligning her Mother identity with that…
Review by Geri Lipschultz Emotionally and thematically resonant, Barbara Henning’s thirteenth book is a slim volume of sixty-nine entries, quasi-biographical and quasi-epistolary in nature. Even the title reflects a quality of compression and intimacy that characterizes these entries:…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron In “A Safe Haven for Writers,” the fifth story in Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut collection, This Isn’t Fun Anymore, the narrator enrolls in a writing retreat. While there, she intends to show her husband that she’s…
Monster Galaxy by Cindy Veach Review by Ruth Hoberman On the cover of Monster Galaxy, Cindy Veach’s new book of poems, Athena glows in gold armor, having sprung powerful and fully formed from her father Zeus’s forehead. The…