Six-year-old Martha’s world changes abruptly when her mother dies during childbirth. First she must adjust to having no mother and then, when her father remarries, to a second mother. But she never stops missing her first mother, the mother she struggles to remember. Married to her college sweetheart, she anticipates motherhood. Infertility leads to another shift in plans. She and her husband enter the unfamiliar landscape of interracial and intercultural adoption. They adopt an infant son from South Korea and a daughter from Guatemala. Her children’s attitudes toward maternal loss are very different from Martha’s own. During journeys to South Korea to witness her son’s marriage and to Guatemala to vacation and volunteer with her daughter’s Mayan ancestors, she uncovers new understandings of the ties that bind, and restrain, her complicated family.
Reviewers of Missing Mothers have written:
Mesmerizing, honest, hard to put down.
Totally captivated me from the first page to the last.
Available from Barnes and Noble or your independent bookstore.
A keen eye for the sights and sounds of the natural world characterizes Suzanne Cottrell’s Nature Calls Outside My Window, A Collection of Poems and Stories. Throughout the collection, we hear the literal calls of nature from birds to bison, but we also feel the invitation to step into the natural environment and find our place within it. 
In her latest collection, Louisiana State Poet Laureate Mona Lisa Saloy offers her answer to the enduring question: Who are Black Creoles? These poems are anchored both in Saloy’s ancestral connections and in her lived experiences of remaining a part of this world: cuisine, community, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, pandemic lockdowns, and surviving hurricanes in her Seventh Ward family home that she rebuilt in the long decade after Katrina.
“Pet lovers will lap up every word of this charming and candid memoir of a single woman opening her heart and home to an emotionally complicated cat. Like the best pet stories, it is what we learn about the human experience that matters most.”
“The best kind of historical fiction: a wonderful read with a marvelous heroine.”
Based on hundreds of letters exchanged by a couple separated by World War II, this book describes the author’s journey to discover her parents’ past. 
I don’t know about you, but no matter where we’re traveling, especially if we’re having a wonderful time, we invariably stop at the local realtor’s office to peer at the listings and indulge in a one-month rental fantasy. We choose the house we like best, convert the price from euros to dollars, and then fly home and forget entirely about our dream until our next one-week vacation. Except this once.
What These Hands Remember recreates a childhood in rural Idaho and illustrates how the many joys and sorrows of family life centered in the natural world may lead to cherished memories. The poems are dedicated to readers everywhere in hopes that they will find comfort in reclaiming the delights and trials of innocence during these challenging times.
The story of two women in 1973 NYC: one, age twenty-three, is despairing and without direction having barely survived the turbulent household of her parents, along with her own adolescent foray into sixties’ hippiedom. 
In Roberta Schultz’s fourth chapbook, ASKING PRICE, questions are key to examining humanity’s relationship to the planet we live on. Who eats what? When comes another dragon’s charm for pain? Why don’t we ever see a live armadillo?
“How many windows can the heart bear?” asks Linda Tomol Pennisi in The Burning Boat, and how many nesting selves does today’s self carry? Invoking the muses of dance, music, and art, Pennisi listens many layers beneath the chatter, exposing those lustrous synapses where we “understand for a moment what the world is made of.” 
After her husband’s massive heart attack some years ago, Cynthia Hogue began spontaneously writing poems based on dreams and memories that her husband, born into occupied France, had shared with her of being a child growing up in a time of vast wartime and postwar food shortages. When asked by a curious American, members of her extended family in France told never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—a hidden child. Their stories crystallized into instead, it is dark, which Ilya Kaminsky has called “a beautiful spell of a book.” Weaving history of there and present day here in poems that explore how an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry speaks a complex truth, these poems cast a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of the book—love. 
Mother-Daughter Banquet untangles the knot of memory and finds a thread of love and reconciliation.
“I don’t have words strong enough to convey the depth of feeling these stories aroused in me. Painful, poignant, wistful, evocative, hopeful, sensual, tragic . . . real. Simply stunning.”
“Mother Tongue is not only dramatic and engrossing, it is also insightful and wise. Read it! Read it! You will never forget it!”
Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1940s – the shy and introverted only child of a glamorous, eccentric divorcée – was a challenge that proved to be lifelong – and ironically the catalyst that propelled the author to go on the professional stage.
Beautiful Dreamer