MER Bookshelf – July 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Catherine Gigante-Brown, Immigrant Hearts, Volossal, March 2025, literary fiction (novel Immigrant Hearts is a vintage love story that stretches across more than 40 years, from the 1920s to the…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Angela Williamson Thoughtfully curated, Commodore Rookery, by Christy Lee Barnes, captures and recasts the first year of parenthood. Through the lens of the rookery, where the speaker goes for inspiration, insight, and wonder, the familiar challenges of…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason I first became familiar with Jennifer Lang’s writing just after she published her first book, Places We Left Behind. It included all the ingredients I enjoy in a memoir: a cross-cultural story, an unusual structure,…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson is smart, sexy, highly relatable book. Lipson’s prose delves into what it means to be a woman, mother, and daughter and had me exclaiming, “Yes! Exactly!”…
Review by Emily Webber Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm’s debut novel, follows the unforgettable Rosenberg family—consisting of Leon, Louise, and their daughter Lydia —over forty years as they navigate life, especially in the face of a terminal…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Unassuming women of fierce literary imaginations can find themselves historically reduced to spinsterhood or a perceived existence of wistful eccentricity, myths that contribute to a legacy of emotional isolation that diminishes their artistic prowess. In…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Pramila Venkateswaran, Exile is not a Foreign Word, Copper Coin, November 2024, poetry Exile is not a Foreign Word addresses the kinds of barriers we experience in our lives that affect us for generations.…
Review by Jane Ward “It’s pitch black and Alice won’t stop screaming.” (4) Two pages into The Fun Times Brigade, author Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and I am fully transported to my own…
Review by Carla Panciera In the latter pages of award-winning author Laurette Folk’s newest novel Eleison, a young priest struggling with his vows declares, “‘I often think of what Augustine said, how the disorder of the soul is its…
Review by Sharon Tracey In tether & lung—Kimberly Ann Priest’s second full-length poetry collection—the poet threads finely wrought narrative poems borne of unrequited love and desire, grief and trauma, and the scent of shame never far off as “every…