Aimee Suzara First Ultrasound of a Trickster What did you sound like, that first time? A flutter: the wings of a furious butterfly, thrum of a colibrí. Twice my heart’s speed, yours. A life-force undeniable. A wild new fish already swimming upstream, all swashbuckle and verve, all grit and ashé. Already my Santonilyo (1) playing in my waters: opening the way. (1) Santonilyo is the syncretized version of Santo Niño, a deity known to play in the waters and until current day, helps protect the people. The Santo Niño is seen as a significant figure in the Catholization…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Congratulations and good luck to our Best of the Net Nominees! MER Best of the Net 2026 Nominations Poetry Adrie Rose Ajanae Dawkins Jill Crammond Jennifer Garfield Maria Mazziotti Gillan Megan Merchant CNF Geula Geurtz Krista Lee Hanson Art Sarah Lightman
Jennifer Jean on Where do you live? and Mojdeh Bahar on Silence and Lost Words: A Conversation on Translation MER is pleased to present an interview with two authors on their recent books of poetry in translation: Jennifer Jean on Where do you live? and Mojdeh Bahar on Silence and Lost Words. Jean and Bahar then interviewed each other, leading to an intriguing and revealing conversation. Enjoy! JENNIFER JEAN ON WHERE DO YOU LIVE? Where Do You Live? is a bilingual, collaborative collection of questions and responses in Arabic and English, written and co-translated by Iraqi…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Marjorie Maddox, Seeing Things, Wildhouse Publishing, February 2025, poetry With its focus on memory, illness, and their ramifications, Seeing Things explores overlapping roles of a daughter whose mother is entering the beginning stages of dementia and of a mother whose daughter is struggling with depression. These poems also witness a woman juggling her own memories of abuse and survival who lives in a world unsettled by shifting boundaries of truth and fabrication. Ultimately, Seeing Things explores the ways that we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, see or disregard those around…
Review by Jiwon Choi In Slip, Nicole Callihan, author of chigger ridge, This Strange Garment, SuperLoop, The Couples, and many more titles, offers up poems that are in full force of their elegant and vivid language, poems that are gleefully punchy and cranky, poems that reveal just how much upheaval we must deal with in the day to day living of our lives. Upheaval which we, as the poet reminds us, bring upon ourselves and bring upon others. This is revealed right away in the book’s beginning poem, “Stick”. The stick in question, found “at the mouth of the…
& You Think It Ends poems by Amy Small-McKinney Review by Rebecca Jane & You Think It Ends opens wounds and exposes their lasting impact. Rape, gun violence, genocide, unsafe abortion, drug abuse, emotional abuse, bird extinction, and widowhood form the psychological landscape of these poems. For comfort, the poet offers a blanket, choices, time, and memory. When we least expect it, the aging body gets a voice. The wise woman reminds us, “we inherited sorrow / we also inherited strength” (35). With all this sorrow, how do we find the strength to heal and transcend? Amy Small-McKinney, Montgomery…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron Three years ago, I resigned from my lawyer job to write a novel. The seed had been planted two years prior, during our pandemic lockdown. In November 2020, my 4th and 6th graders and I embarked on a challenge: we enrolled in the now-defunct NaNoWriMo program and each spent thirty days drafting our first novel. My children’s stories were wild fantastical romps, fully-formed and primed for several sequels. Mine was an ode to my maternal line. Finishing it, I realized, was going to be a full-time job. At press time, it’s 2025. And while I…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Elizabeth’s Sylvia’s new book presents itself modestly: My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties contains only twenty-four poems, and their tone (like the title) is low-key. But such a book isn’t “little” when it’s a forceful, principled embrace of wit, complexity and understatement. In poems that take a range of forms (pantoum, sonnet crown, shaped poems among them) Sylvia strips domestic life of its banality. The experience of being a wife, mother, daughter, beekeeper, and teacher comes across as insistently embodied and strangely unsettling. Household objects, for one thing, are a little eerie. “I have an…
Review by Emily Webber When reading Flood, Christine Kalafus’s debut memoir, there’s a constant feeling of being pulled by raging waters, swept up into something you can’t control, the feeling of waters rising and rising, and you can’t do anything to stop it. There’s a good reason for this. Kalafus, in the immediacy of the present tense, is describing both literal and metaphorical floods. The moon is wide, red, and does not help me. When I collide with knotted roots and rocks, I slip, silent. I could stop, talk to the factory workers. Take my chances. I’m a…
“We bring you here to see dead things—” A folio of the supernatural in motherhood * As we enter autumn, the veil between the living and the dead things becomes gauzier; time seems to take on a different meaning. As Tzynya Pinchback says in “Menarche,” “everything now is before and after, everything now is before and after. Something wild in us all.” The poems in MER’s September folio center the supernatural in motherhood. In “Orchard Revisited,” a poem rich with the smell of ripe apples, Diannely Antigua writes of her miscarried nephew, “my sister and her husband waited //…