MER Bookshelf April 2024 Books of poetry, memoir, fiction, short stories, and an anthology on our radar….. Sarah Ghazal Ali, Theophanies. Alice James Books, 2024. (poetry). Moving between the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, the poems…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Jessy Randall I first encountered the work of Erin Malone when I was on a badly-managed, amateurish, truly terrible three-person judging panel for a chapbook contest that no longer exists. Malone’s manuscript was, in my opinion, the…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Marjorie Maddox’s most recent book, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, is a (mostly) joyous celebration of prickly, eccentric visions. In 2018, Maddox tells us, she and her daughter, Anna Lee Hafer, a visual…
Rue Matthiessen Castles & Ruins—A Challenging Narrative. When I undertook to return to Ireland with my young family to try to find a castle called Annaghkeen, that I had lived near to as a child, I certainly did not…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Castles and Ruins is a quiet, ruminative memoir shifting between the narrator’s year in Ireland as a child and her return years later as an adult with her husband and six-year-old son. Rue’s father, Peter…
Review by Christina Kelly This quietly searing collection of poems by Ann E. Wallace documents the confusion, pain and terror of the Covid pandemic, beginning when she first became severely ill in March 2020. Wallace, the 2023-24 Poet Laureate…
Review by Jane Ward On the first day of first grade, my daughter and I walked into a room decorated by her new teacher with the usual lively trimmings: a colorful reading area rug, labeled cubbies for puzzles and…
Review by Ellen Meeropol When the reader first meets Mia, she is trying to find her bra. “I live in my car,” she tells us, “and I only have one bra. It has to be around here somewhere. I…
Review by Carole Mertz Rollender Ties Her Faith Concepts to Her Poetic Vision Nicole Rollender’s emotional and richly endowed poems touch the heart. Very personal, they cover themes of maternal love, dreams and dreaming, religiosity, sobriety, marital fidelity,…
Review by Nicole Callihan “Can you see why I mother every possible thing?” Kai Coggin asks in Mother of Other Kingdoms. Here, in “Tender and Ache,” the poet has scooped a bumble bee from the windowpane, cupped his slow…