MER February Bookshelf Lots of intriguing new and recent books, many from our contributors. Take a look! Morgan Baker Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes (Ten16Press, May 2023; memoir) is about reinventing yourself, learning how to handle loss,…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Laura Dennis I love novels for the vast landscapes they traverse, the many shades of human experience they evoke. Although short fiction elicits pleasure on a different scale, every so often I encounter a story collection that…
Review by Jessica Manack “It was when spring felt real. As if/it would stick around for a while (59).” In her fifth collection, Oblivescence, or “the act of forgetting,” accomplished poet Kelly R. Samuels takes the reader on the…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Lately, I’ve been obsessed with groups of three: triads, tercets, triplets. There is a wyrd sisterhood about the number, mystical and yet as sturdy as a wooden stool. Thomas De Quincey, in his book of…
Review by Sharon Tracey Emily Hockaday’s poetry collection, In a Body, is a study in shape-shifting and an exploration of the intimate relationship between the body and pain as a mother, daughter, and partner. The presence of pain hovers…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen For parents who have lost children, there are personal and highly distinctive similarities in their stories, and there are stark differences. If one is adept at writing non-fiction, one’s innermost revelations will become a…
New and Coming Soon Sarah Gutowski, The Familiar. TRP: The University Press of SHSU January 2024. Poetry The Familiar is a narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis. It mimics the bizarre, darkly funny experience of midlife by making literal the…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Cathy Ulrich’s second book, Small, Burning Things, she proves again how mighty flash fiction can be. These tight short stories are mostly women- or girl-centered, and all of the fiction brought in some…
Review by Melanie McGehee Amanda Galvan Huynh’s debut poetry book Where My Umbilical is Buried tells her Chicano family’s story. It is a scrapbook journey, taking us through towns of rural Texas and the lives of three generations, beginning…
Review by Jessica Manack Dedicated to her mother, the second collection of poems by Francesca Bell, What Small Sound, is a group of ruminations on being mothered and being a mother, and the way the former informs the latter,…