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: June 29, 2022
Set as justified rectangles of text, often comprising a single, elaborate sentence on a page, the poems in Eamon Grennan’s new collection Plainchant (“these plain words—to be taken out at times of need”) appear […]
Date: June 29, 2022
Ellen Meeropol is a fearless writer. When she picks up her pen and follows her characters, she goes to places and situations lesser writers might avoid: a young pregnant woman […]
Date: June 21, 2022
John Weir’s “Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me,” alternately identified as “Short Stories” and “Linked Stories” — 11 in all — is wise, often funny, and poignant yet unsentimental testimony from […]
Date: June 16, 2022
At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their […]
Date: June 6, 2022
At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their […]
Date: June 6, 2022
“Weir writes beautifully, elegantly.” The horrific AIDS epidemic inspired a flourishing of literature by writers more openly, proudly, often angrily, gay than their predecessors had been. These young writers had […]
Date: June 2, 2022
ADAM KIRSCH’S FOURTH BOOK of poetry, The Discarded Life, is an autobiography in blank verse, organized into 40 numbered parts, like cantos, each averaging a comfortable 26 or 27 lines, […]
Date: May 31, 2022
Are Jigdesh and Charlie, the brilliantly depicted leads in Carlos Allende’s new novel, gay caricatures? The author’s answer may surprise you.
Date: May 24, 2022
Date: May 23, 2022
Beware Kim Dower’s poetry. Again and again, this crafty writer invites you in for a casual chat and then wallops you. Her poem “Game Over” starts with a little comedy about […]