Review by Elizabeth Paul Susan Ayres is a poet, translator, and lawyer who teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law. She is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies, a chapbook that journeys through inner and outer…
Browsing: Reviews
Review by Mary Ellen Talley We enter Laura Garrard’s debut poetry chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, with “Paddling the Sweet Spot,” a poem in quatrains that introduces readers to strength and strategy in water sports…
Review by Melissa Kutsche Hitler and My Mother-in-Law by Terese Svoboda focuses on the life and career of the author’s mother-in-law, Patricia (Pat) Lochridge Hartwell. Hartwell was the first woman hired in news at CBS Radio, worked for UNICEF,…
Review by Cameron Walker As I read Samina Najmi’s moving essay collection, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, I was reminded of a game we played as children in our school library. We’d gather…
Review by Emily Webber The characters in Suzanne Kamata’s short stories in River of Dolls are often caught between cultures, wishing for things they don’t have, and in transit to their next job, relationship, or new home. Big things…
MER Bookshelf Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Preeti Vangani, Fifty Mothers, River River Books, February 2026, poetry Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker’s Bombay home.…
Review by Julia Lisella Dorian Elizabeth Knapp asks the questions everyone is thinking—what is poetry in the age of AI? What is poetry in the face of a dying planet? What is poetry at the cusp of a democracy…
MER Bookshelf – January 2026 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Forthcoming books with flair! Susan L. Leary, More Flowers, Trio House Press, February 2026, poetry With lyrical acuity, philosophical insight, and deep reverence for girlhood, womanhood, and the wildly…
Review by Sharon Tracey Laura Cresté’s first full-length poetry collection, In the Good Years, opens with dead horses and ancestors, garden slugs and chipmunks, and two feisty and devoted mothers. There’s an immediacy and honesty as the poet…
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason Diane Botnick writes in the prologue of her novel, Becoming Sarah, that a midwife at Auschwitz delivered 3000 babies and most were brutally murdered as soon as they were born. Only 30 survived. She imagines…