Emily Mernin

A speaker wonders, “Is this beauty, all this grass?” Looking out on the prairies, at “grass-covered hill after grass-covered hill,” they ask their listener to “be quiet for once. Less / than your own boot print.” In her sixth collection, Wellwater, Karen Solie narrows her focus, looking to the ground and the “belowground” for what we can learn from…

There is a growth on the back of Kathleen’s neck. A mole is “flirting with the idea of becoming cancerous” despite the decades that the gardener has spent pulling on protective gear — collared shirts, hats, gloves — before working in the sun. She also feels a pain in her mouth, from “a molar that has been warning her off and on for years.” In Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road…

In December 1998, Chloe wanders through her aunt’s apartment in Toulon, France. She has only a few hours to herself before her father’s sister comes out of surgery. The small flat — which once belonged to the thirty-two-year-old writer’s paternal grandparents — has been the only constant familial home she’s known. It served as an immovable…

The unnamed narrator of Hides realizes his mother is dead by touching her. “It is not enough to say that the hand had grown cold, though it had, very cold, in fact,” he recalls, “but the veins themselves, the gentle throb of blood coursing across her papery, liver-spotted skin, seemed depreciated — flattened.” Rod Moody-Corbett’s remarkable debut is about the protective walls that go up as we…

An unnamed narrator opens the final chapter of Rachel Cusk’s novel Parade: “Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did — the rest of her remained obstinately alive.” The balance consists, in part, of their revelations after the drawn-out death of their unknowable, distant parent. Months after her…