Review by Constance Clark To evoke mother in our thoughts and emotions, rarely do we think of fluidity. More often, stops and starts, bumps in the road, outright rage. I suppose, continuous flow of love could be the anomaly…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Emily Webber Hotel Impala, Pat Spears’s third novel, tackles a trio of American catastrophes—mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. Her work typically features characters on the margins of society, who many would label as failures and deadbeats, always…
Review by Rebecca Jane A Slow Indwelling features two courageous voices that confront pain with poetry. Megan Merchant, a recent winner of the New American Book Prize and author of Hortensia, in Winter weaves her insights about blood, longing,…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Adrie Rose’s Rupture arrives at a time of profound concern for women’s health issues, and her journey of dealing with an ectopic pregnancy brings a poignant and painful lens to the intricate and intimate details of…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor With breathtaking originality, Those Absences Now Closest propelled this reader into the visceral world of war and the generational trauma that no one whose ancestry has been victimized can escape. Poet and translator, Dzvinia…
Review by Connie Jordan Green Linda Parsons, native Tennessean, is an editor and a prolific writer of poetry, essays, and plays. To come upon a volume of Parsons’ work is to know one is in for a pleasant, but…
Review by Linda McCauley Freeman There is an almost indescribable moment when you first nudge your way into a hoarder’s house. An assault not only of your senses, but also of the very foundation of reality, stability and yes,…
MER Bookshelf – February 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Julia C. Alter, Some Dark Familiar, Green Writers Press, April 2024, poetry Julia C. Alter’s Some Dark Familiar begins as an excavation of the shadow sides of motherhood– often…
MER Bookshelf – January 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Dzvinia Orlowsky, Those Absences Now Closest, Carnegie Mellon University Press, October 2024, poetry. In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready…
Review by Joellen Craft Too Much to Ask: Bridget Bell and the Toxic Positivity of American Motherhood In the midst of a great era for “mommy poetry,” Bell’s debut, All That We Ask of You Is to Always…