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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Date: March 3, 2026
April Ossmann discusses poetry collection, WE with Derate the Hate podcast.
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 […]
Date: March 3, 2026
Molly McCloy discusses her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES: THE SPITEFUL ORIGINS OF THE HAPPIEST DYKE ON EARTH with Hannah Harlee.
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 […]
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 […]
Date: August 3, 2022
The Discarded Life: Poems, by Adam Kirsch (Red Hen): “Do details matter?” asks the poet Adam Kirsch in his new collection The Discarded Life—and even if they don’t, the perspicuity […]
Date: August 3, 2022
Diane Thiel’s much-awaited anthology of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, is worth the wait. This collection is divided into four parts, each touching on a particular subject or idea that […]
Date: July 21, 2022
Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy, and Questions from Outer Space (Red Hen Press, 2022) is her third collection of poems. I purchased […]
Date: July 21, 2022
Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged […]
Date: July 21, 2022
Yuvi Zalkow’s I Only Cry with Emoticons tells the story of a damaged man trying to finish his novel as he wades through divorce, an unfulfilling work life, and complex […]
Date: July 11, 2022
Questions From Outer Space is about coming to terms with humanity’s destructive choices and orienting ourselves to life as a result. Diane Thiel’s poems lament our destruction of planet Earth and […]
Date: July 7, 2022
Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love is a delightful beach read, a lampoon of American culture that provides plenty of suspenseful fun.
Date: July 7, 2022
Charlie, who has never found anything he doesn’t like to talk about, and Jignesh, a quiet, overweight East Indian business manager and embezzler, meet through a gay dating site. They […]
Date: July 6, 2022
For three decades, the novelist and short story writer John Weir has been spooling out wry, wrenching narratives that ground us in time and place. Now, Red Hen Press has […]
Date: July 5, 2022
Yuvi Zalkow’s novel I Only Cry with Emoticons is a defense of the personal encounter. As technology has become more advanced, we have become increasingly reliant on communicating via screens. Emojis have […]