MER Bookshelf – March 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Lynn McGee, Science Says Yes, Broadstone Books, January 2025, poetry Science Says Yes by Lynn McGee addresses human empathy and resilience in relation to nature, advances in technology and the perplexing dynamics of a world hurtling toward its own apocalypse. The poems invite the reader to resist isolation and expand their capacity for kindness towards themselves and the environment. Each poem’s title is a headline which was searched out and matched to the poem after it was written. This adds unexpected layers of meaning and speaks to the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Nicelle Davis Beyond Survival: Nadia Alexis’s Testament to Love, Memory, and Reclamation Beyond the Watershed by Nadia Alexis is not just a collection of poetry and photography—it is a haunting echo of lineage, an unflinching dialogue between a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother. Alexis does not merely document; she conjures. She does not simply describe; she immerses. Every image, every line, pulses with the weight of inheritance, with the tension between pain and resilience. This is poetry that does not just speak of survival—it embodies it. In “Portraits,” Alexis captures love not as a…
Review by Meghan Miraglia “[W]hat comes after the last word”: A review of Hortensia, in winter The first line of Megan Merchant’s Hortensia, in winter is a damn good one: “I want to ask the hard questions, but they sharpen back to god.” The line is from “Invocation”, a poem summoning Mississippi ditches and lineage and “bones and chapped prayers” (17) As the best first poems do, “Invocation” sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Hortensia, in winter is a series of prose poems (a form Merchant has mastered), but more than that, it is a…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In her latest chapbook, Gala, Lynne Shapiro melds persona and ekphrasis in an extended look at David Salle’s work and woman as artistic subject, especially in the painting “The Black Bra.” The poems offer a commentary on the surrealist movement, the objectification or glorification of women—or parts of women— and how Salle’s work in particular and all art in general is in conversation with other art. Shapiro is an award-winning poet and editor who lives in New Jersey and who has served as poet-in residence in England, Morocco and Spain. She worked in the…
Review by Rachel Lutwick-Deaner Flu Season is Katie Kalisz’s second poetry collection, following Quiet Woman (2019) and those readers who appreciate her previous attention to the stillness and sweetness of life will not be disappointed. Flu Season examines the uncertainty and, often, dread that characterizes motherhood and life in fragile times. This text is not only about the pandemic, but it looks at life and death in many forms–from the natural world to family, neighbors, and friends to anticipation of what deaths may come. The arc of the collection mirrors prodrome, illness, and recovery: Getting Warm, Dread, Red Circles,…
Mothering Along – MER Online Poetry Folio Curated by Cindy Veach and Jennifer Martelli In her poem, “Memo to the Absent,” Wendy Scher presents the Sabbath table set for two: the mother and the daughter. She writes, “We miss you as we kindle the flames, as we taste the wine, as we gather to eat, two shadows on the ceiling.” The poems in our March folio, Mothering Alone, present these moments that feel so touching, so emotional, woven into the tapestry of single parenthood, whether due to circumstances or to choices. The poems burn, like the Sabbath candles, with…
Julia C. Alter The Nursing Chair It’s an off-white chair, a chair that sits four feet from a TV in a house that’s somehow only five minutes from me. It’s empty, holding only the grimy imprint of a heavy body, the imprint I glimpse through a window in the dark. The body belongs to my son’s dad, who has paused the game on the screen to grab another beer from the kitchen. It’s Sunday again, and again I’ve avoided this all day—dropping our son’s packed lunchbox in his backpack on the busted deck because how can a gray shadow…
Ana María Carbonell Ledger & Vermouth –They say after everything is gone cockroaches remain. The clicking of ice cubes in the back office told them she was home (maybe she’d been there for hours). She’d pour a vermouth (or two) and in her 8” by 14” hardcover ledger neatly log deposits & expenses that had to add up (she had five children). Even when she couldn’t sleep, she’d rise at six to teach seven classes. Then go to a second job, discuss loans with bankers who’d say, Go home and ask your husband. Tell him to call us…
Savannah Cooper-Ramsey By Four Months My body anticipates your illness by overproducing milk. I wake wet with it. You cry so much, and neither of us truly sleeps. “Why?” I say, “Why?” as I remember not to shake you in the least before reaching down to cradle you, sweet, hot, and small. We are both so tired: you from bawling in discomfort and me listening awake to your changed breath straining, clogged, and steady. With nobody to watch us, I fear drifting off with you in my arms. When your cold clears, I make lists. I think of them…
Jill Crammond When I Sell My Wedding Ring at the Pawn Shop —After Morgan Parker I grow wings with the following conditions. Divorced is defined as not married, my children renamed fledglings. Single mother is understood to be metaphor for on the market. The market is a grocery store, is a shop with meat, is a niche boutique where I sell discounted me to the shopper with a hand-drawn coupon. Does this make me sound like a domestic long-hair looking for her forever home? My home has always been a shelter. I have always been feral, been stray on…