My Books
Church Ladies
Fernwood Press, June 2023
Renee Emerson’s Church Ladies is an invitation into the lives of women in the church—prophetesses, wives, saints, mothers, martyrs, daughters, and anyone who has been a tender of a family or community: in other words, those who know “the day has no end to its asking.” Through lush descriptions, startling images, and a lineage of fierce foremothers, this book illuminates the joys, burdens, steadfastness, and grief of women nurturing faith and the faithful across generations. The faith of Emerson’s speakers, however, is not an easy one, nor is it sustained by miracles and majesty. Instead, it’s carved out of dailiness and acknowledges the toll of life’s losses. In the end, Church Ladies is a complex and moving praise song to the persistence of anyone who can say, “when I held out my open hand / I didn’t choose what God took from it,” and who—like the women of this book—holds out their open hand again and again anyway. —Molly Spencer, author of If the House and Hinge
The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants
Belle Point Press, January 2023
The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants invites us to consider the difficulty of caring for living things. At the heart of such reflections lies an undercurrent of grief over the loss of a child and the trouble in finding ways to keep living. From neglected office plants or parking lot shrubs to roadside grass and backyard blooms, Renee Emerson evokes the sacramental through the most ephemerally permanent materials around us.
Threshing Floor
Jacar Press, September 2016
“Threshing Floor tells the story of three women, their vulnerability and displacement; it will grip and hold women. But, please God, may the book also be read by men—lots of men—because these poems are models of empathy in a world that sorely needs it.”
— Jeanne Murray Walker, author of Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems
Keeping Me Still
Winter Goose Publishing, April 2014
In her poems ornamented with quotidian glimpses of fallen Southern beauty--morning glory vines, signs in front of roadside churches, chiggers in the grass--Renee Emerson sees the South anew. These are stories of love and grace, laced with the leavening mystery of lyric and unflinching in their reaching after the knife-like truths of our living.
- Bobby C. Rogers, author of Paper Anniversary Winner of the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Reading Keeping Me Still resembles the pleasure of watching a gifted athlete. Emerson is a swift, muscular noticer: The coyote's voice resembling a baby's; Satan with his pitchfork on a country church marquee; A snakes' coil like a diacritical mark; The moon 'a mimosa-colored omen . . . God's thumbnail.' And the noticing is fierce, ardent rather than ornamental. The book's central perception guides these images to a central focus: “there is something in love/ that calls for blood.”
- Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate
Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike
Winter Goose Publishing, November 2022
Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike captures the mystery and misadventures of a child's summer while shadowed by grief. While getting into mischief with new friends, twelve-year-old Silas obsesses over his inability to ride a bike. His worries are only compounded by the recent death of his mother and the distance of his grieving father. Emerson perfectly captures the nature of loss in light of new possibilities and promises. Her novel never shies away from melancholy realities but still manages to provide plenty of levity and joy.
- Megan Foster, writer for The Drizzle Review