MER Bookshelf – March 2026
Date: March 19, 2026
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and […]
News & Reviews
News:
Molly McCloy talks about her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES, on KJZZ Phoenix!
Date: March 17, 2026
Tucson storyteller Molly McCloy loves telling stories about hard things. She’s done it on stage and in print. Her memoir, “Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on […]
Maurya Simon interviewed by Sean Singer on his Substack, The Sharpener!
Date: March 17, 2026
Maurya Simon’s The Blue Bridge, her twelfth volume of poems, will appear in 2026 (Etruscan Press). Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers […]
Amy Pence discusses her upcoming novel YELLOW in an interview with ArtsATL!
Date: March 12, 2026
During Hurricane Irma in 2017, a 90-foot oak tree split and fell into the middle of Amy Pence’s cottage in the old fishing village of Pine Lake, Georgia. A beam […]
Luke Goebel’s KILL DICK featured in Our Culture Magazine’s list of most anticipated books of spring 2026
Date: March 11, 2026
It’s finally warming up here in Washington, DC, and earlier this month was the first instance I was able to comfortably sit on our roof and read. With a coffee […]
April Ossmann interviewed on the Derate the Hate podcast!
Date: March 3, 2026
April Ossmann discusses poetry collection, WE with Derate the Hate podcast.
Amy Pence’s YELLOW listed on Bookstr!
Date: March 3, 2026
Yellow is a slow-bloom speculative novel and quietly cosmic. It’s a book about how long childhood wonders and wounds can linger, how the universe keeps whispering even when we stop […]
Molly McCloy interviewed on The ARTWIFE Podcast!
Date: March 3, 2026
Molly McCloy discusses her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES: THE SPITEFUL ORIGINS OF THE HAPPIEST DYKE ON EARTH with Hannah Harlee.
Amy Pence’s YELLOW listed in Deep South Magazine!
Date: March 3, 2026
It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence […]
Luke Goebel’s KILL DICK listed in the New York Post!
Date: February 24, 2026
This satirical literary thriller has shades of Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. A 19-year-old NYU dropout returns home to Brentwood to laze about and enjoy popping prescription pills. But […]
Reviews:
Brenda Cárdenas’ TRACE featured in ‘La Treintena 2023: 30 (Something) Books of Latinx Poetry’!
Date: May 11, 2023
Over the past year, Latina/o/x poets spanning vast aesthetics, experiences, and geographies have dazzled me with collections that reveal the complexity and beauty of our communities in all their irreducible […]
REFUGEE by Pamela Uschuk reviewed in Compulsive Reader!
Date: May 8, 2023
How can we take refuge amid the pains of this world? In this collection, Pamela Uschuk, winner of an American Book Award in 2010, faces the realities of recent social […]
THE SKIN OF MEANING by Keith Flynn Reviewed in North of Oxford!
Date: May 1, 2023
The Skin of Meaning by Keith Flynn is an interesting mixture of contemporary reactions to issues that affect us in the twenty-first century. Keith presents one hundred and eighty-one pages of poetry divided […]
YA Books Central Reviewed AQUEOUS by Jade Shyback!
Date: May 1, 2023
Aqueous is a debut novel set in a world where life on land is dangerous and harsh. To save humanity, an underwater paradise is built in the ocean.
David Mas Masumoto’s SECRET HARVESTS featured in the Southern Review of Books!
Date: April 25, 2023
David Mas Masumoto has a reputation as a remarkable writer. His previous work includes Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1996), Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil (1998), and Four […]
Brenda Cárdenas’ TRACE featured in RHINO Reviews!
Date: April 25, 2023
I heard Brenda Cárdenas read from her new collection, Trace, at The Hungry Brain in Chicago: an incantation, a call to action. By the time I got to the book […]
RHINO Poetry reviews Francesca Bell’s WHAT SMALL SOUND!
Date: April 25, 2023
Between grief and relief, Francesca Bell’s poems don’t pause, they flow – like a warm bath, and someone quietly bringing a candle; then a cold shower, and the body awakened […]
DRUMMING WITH DEAD CAN DANCE by Peter Ulrich reviewed in PROG!
Date: April 24, 2023
A long-overdue tale recounted by way of an erstwhile member’s memoir.
Jade Shyback’s AQUEOUS featured in Kirkus Reviews!
Date: April 18, 2023
Climate disasters amplified by greed have rendered Earth’s surface uninhabitable and space travel impossible; now just three deep-ocean merstations stand between humankind and extinction. Desperate to ensure her last child’s […]
Alyssa Graybeal’s FLOPPY reviewed in Library Journal!
Date: April 18, 2023
In this compelling memoir, debut author and cartoonist Graybeal writes about her life living with chronic pain and her childhood diagnosis of the rare genetic connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos […]