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:
A Review of Refugee by Pamela Uschuk in the North American Review
Date: September 12, 2022
“Since all around us refugees seem to be fleeing from something, one must ask from what they themselves flee—and that it’s hard to imagine there is anywhere left one can go […]
Glowing Review of THE HEALING CIRCLE by Coco Picard from Midwest Review
Date: September 12, 2022
A unique and inherently engaging novel about life, death, and dying, “The Healing Circle” showcases author Coco Picard’s natural flair for crafting a novel of serious substance with a flair […]
Shelf Awareness Reviews Marybeth Holleman’s TENDER GRAVITY
Date: September 8, 2022
Although Marybeth Holleman’s five books are all deeply rooted in Alaska’s landscape and wildlife, Tender Gravity is her first expression of that connection through poetry. The title phrase comes from the first […]
North of Oxford Reviews Joshua Rivkin’s SUITOR!
Date: September 8, 2022
By Charles Rammelkamp “we are what happens by accident,” Joshua Rivkin writes in the first “Envoi” of this lyrical, emotionally probing collection, and goes on: Suitor, from the Latin secutor, to […]
North of Oxford Reviews TOUCHING CREATURES, TOUCHING SPIRIT by Judy Grahn
Date: September 8, 2022
Judy Grahn’s Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit is a thought-provoking study of relationships between human and nonhuman creatures and spirits. It collects ten nonfiction essays, divided into three parts, with a vivid record […]
REFUGEE by Pamela Uschuk reviewed in Rain Taxi
Date: August 22, 2022
“’So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,’ Pamela Uschuk questions in ‘A […]
Anchorage Daily News reviews Emily Wall’s BREAKING INTO AIR and Marybeth Holleman’s TENDER GRAVITY!
Date: August 21, 2022
Boreal Books, founded and edited by Peggy Shumaker, a former Alaska writer laureate, has since 2008 been publishing exemplary poetry and prose by Alaskans. This summer it’s brought forth two […]
Booktrib reviews MONKEY BUSINESS by Carleton Eastlake
Date: August 9, 2022
“Inside their heads, humans are caught in a civil war between the little gleam of intelligence they want to believe is them and the animal which that spark of intelligence evolved to […]
Ruyan Meng’s ONLY THE CAT KNOWS reviewed in Asian Review of Books
Date: August 8, 2022
“Set in rural China during the 1970s, Ruyan Meng’s debut novel Only the Cat Knows is told from the point of view of a young factory worker married to a woman who […]
ONLY THE CAT KNOWS by Ruyan Meng reviewed in Soapberry Review!
Date: August 4, 2022
“A bicycle on which to commute to work. A sewing machine with which to sew new clothes. Eggs, milk, and meat to cure his children of malnutrition. These are a […]