MER Bookshelf – January 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Dzvinia Orlowsky, Those Absences Now Closest, Carnegie Mellon University Press, October 2024, poetry. In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to “cut yourself with a dull razor.” She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching. Keetje Kuipers, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, BOA Editions, April 2025, poetry. The…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Joellen Craft Too Much to Ask: Bridget Bell and the Toxic Positivity of American Motherhood In the midst of a great era for “mommy poetry,” Bell’s debut, All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy (CavanKerry Press, 2025), offers something new: a medically accurate and well-researched portrait of postpartum and perinatal mood disorders. Bell’s book lets us into the brain of a mother on the edge, a mother in need of help; and through her use of research and wrenching, to-the-point lyric, she reminds readers that more mothers than we’d like to acknowledge…
Review by Rebecca Jane With Praying to the God of Small Things, Wisconsin-based poet, Catherine Jagoe pays homage to Earth’s aliveness, within its microcosmic realms—here, insects reveal their ingenuity, and laced wings beguile the witness. These poems urge us to marvel at, say, those multiple eyes on the tiniest of creatures; relish insect wing patterns and mating behavior. Jagoe’s precise lyricism inspires readers to delight in moss, beetles, moths, feelers, mandibles—meet tiny beings on their turf. Catherine Jagoe—also the author of Blood Root, which won several awards, News from the North, and Casting Off—remains true to her gifts: her…
Review by Laurie Kuntz “Put back together by poetry…” is a poignant line from the About the Author paragraph, which is on the last page of Susan’s Vespoli’s book: One of Them Was Mine. This powerful book is a collection of poems about a mother losing a son to drugs, homelessness, and police brutality. The dedication reads: “This book is dedicated to my son Adam Vespoli who was shot and killed by police on March 12, 2022.” The dedication alone sends the reader reeling. The titles of the poems, “Letter to my Son’s Too Short Life,” “My Son As Hummingbird”…
Hilary King Investigations Are you watching your sad detective show our daughter asks us each evening. Sad L. A. detective, sad British detective, sad Swedish detective in gray blue suit standing in a gray blue field, white-shrouded body at his feet. We’re knee deep in mysteries right now, your father and I, these years of work and worry and wondering if we’ll survive to the next. What was left behind when we decided on each other, what late night robberies, what villain with slicked hair and cigarettes? Can we ransom back our youth with exercise and eating like birds? Will…
We’re on the list again! Pleased to have been selected as #3 (we got Bronze!!!) in Poetry! Thanks for the votes and the kind words and thanks to Chill Subs!
MER Bookshelf – December 2024 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Megan Merchant & Luke Johnson, A Slow Indwelling, Harbor Editions, November 2024, poetry. This unique collaborative work explores parenthood, illness, and the beauty found in life’s fragile moments through a series of lyrical epistolary poems. Praised for its lush language and emotional depth, A Slow Indwelling is a must-read for poetry lovers. Adelle Purdham, I Don’t Do Disability & Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, Dundurn Press, November 2024, creative nonfiction (essays) A raw and intimate portrait of family, love, life, relationships, and disability parenting through the eyes of…
Review by Sharon Tracey From the Latin ministerium comes the word ministry: the service and work of providing assistance and care. And in her engaging new collection, Wonderwork, poet and Unitarian Universalist minister Sandra Fees invites us to bear witness to a spiritual journey as she questions and contemplates different ways of seeing, being, and ministering to inner and outer worlds. As she writes in “Inner Cosmology” (p 54): “I pick up sticks the winds tore down / in the aftermath of other people’s storms.” Work that calls her back “to what I once loved.” Herein lies the wonderwork.…
Review by Jeannine Hall Gailey A Passionate Plea for a Dying Planet: Martha Silano’s This One We Call Ours In Martha Silano’s sixth book, the Blue Lynx-prize winning This One We Call Ours from Lynx House Press, the call for action is clear. The world is quite literally burning – fire trucks, smoke in the air, birds leaping from nests to escape the heat. The pandemic is mentioned briefly, but the star of the show, so to speak, is not humanity’s suffering, but the planet’s. Paying attention to wildfires, storms, and dwindling economic and natural resources is a way…
Review by Katie Kalisz Natalie Solmer’s debut collection Water Castle takes as its muses water, grandmothers, and ancestry. It has three sections, “Snowbelt Wind”, “Motherland”, and “Map in My Palm”, 38 poems in total. Each section begins with a water castle poem. In the first, the speaker invites us to “consider, with [her], [her] moats” (15). That poem proceeds to act as a kind of map of the speaker’s whereabouts and dreams she’s let go, places she’s moved to, tended, rented. “Water Castle No. 2” starts with the Gustav Klimt painting “Water Castle”, but then spirals outward with lines…