Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Pramila Venkateswaran, Exile is not a Foreign Word, Copper Coin, November 2024, poetry Exile is not a Foreign Word addresses the kinds of barriers we experience in our lives that affect us for generations. Venkateswaran documents the different political borders she has experienced, from seeing the effects of Partition on India and Pakistan, to the exile of women within families and within one’s own country. The consequences of wall-building to divide gender, caste, race, and class are violent in their enforcement, and traumatize us for generations. These poems also explore the resilience of human…
Author: Mom Egg Review
An Interview with Domenica Ruta, Author of the Novel All the Mothers by Nicole Haroutunian About a chosen family of mothers who have children—initially unbeknownst to them—with the same man, All the Mothers by Domenica Ruta is by turns devastating, hilarious, and paradigm-shifting. Structurally ambitious and narratively propulsive, the novel follows women making bold, courageous choices, forging their own paths, and showing up for one another. In this excerpt, Sandy struggles to feed her curious baby, Rosie, as she waits to meet “the other mother,” Steph, and her child Ash, for the first time. According to the latest…
Review by Jane Ward “It’s pitch black and Alice won’t stop screaming.” (4) Two pages into The Fun Times Brigade, author Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and I am fully transported to my own early days of mothering an inconsolable, colicky newborn. The sleeplessness, the isolation, the need for a break and the equal but ironically opposite unwillingness to be out of reach of the child. The blur that is one day to the next. My experience is well in the past. The novel’s main character, new mother Amy, is in the throes of…
Review by Carla Panciera In the latter pages of award-winning author Laurette Folk’s newest novel Eleison, a young priest struggling with his vows declares, “‘I often think of what Augustine said, how the disorder of the soul is its own punishment.’” (99) In these pages, Folk examines her characters according to, if not their disorders, then certainly the thoughts and behaviors that haunt them. What ensues is an exploration of what it means to be a flawed (and thus very human) being who seeks the kind of mercy one might expect to find in a book so titled. Folk’s…
Review by Sharon Tracey In tether & lung—Kimberly Ann Priest’s second full-length poetry collection—the poet threads finely wrought narrative poems borne of unrequited love and desire, grief and trauma, and the scent of shame never far off as “every animal has its own master.”(3) Divided into four parts (The Gelding, Her Hand, A Tether, Of Lungs), the sections also echo the four chambers of the heart and the lungs each partner tries to inflate, even as a marriage has lost its oxygen and died. There’s also generational history here, the recurring discomfort of bodies not feeling true. Priest invites…
Amanda Auchter IMAGINARY SON: WATER I could say there was a flood and my body the boat that kept you safe. But my body was only temporary, and would buckle come morning. I would let you live in each part of me: eyelid, elbows, clavicle. But now you are being held by the fluorescent ether like a bowl, a bird, a wailing god. You take your first damp breath. This is all yours. Your own splendid body. Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and…
The most perilous part of girlhood is that it ends: on Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood Review by Anna Rollins Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays speaks of topics such as sexual violence, eating disorders, miscarriage, and medical motherhood. In Fraterrigo’s essays, adolescence is painted in golden strokes, sunny poolside summers and slam books at school. And while violence often awaits the narrator in these idyllic scenes, the true danger lies in the passing of time: when the pages of girlhood turn to womanhood. Fraterrigo’s memoir in essays explores how the inevitability of aging and death impacts one’s…
Review by Rebecca Jane Incidental Pollen delivers wisdom relating to the experiences of being a nurse, the patients’ courage, and the vistas of grief, spanning verdant mystery to papery decay. These poems bare witness to the degradation of natural resources while also paying homage to bees, trees, nectar, pollen, imagination, and longing. Ellen Austin-Li’s debut collection contains narrative poetry that awakens the heart. Incidental Pollen has received recognition from Trio Award, Wisconsin Poetry Series, and Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. As the cofounder of Poetry Night at Sitwell’s in Cincinnati, Austin-Li also shows up as a poet who has a…
Review by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice In her most recent and Pulitzer-prize nominated collection, Bone Country, author Linda Nemec Foster takes readers on a breathless tour through Europe and especially her beloved Poland. Yet, these crystalline prose poems are no flaneur or tourist takes; they are attempts to grapple with belonging and boundaries, to reify the bridges to those who are bone-close, yet unreachable. In a collection whose title calls to mind Dickinson’s “Zero at the Bone,” Foster circles, approaches, and retreats, touching those places and people both vital and ultimately unknowable. Foster is the author of 14 collections of…
Review by Susan Michele Coronel “What a woman knows, she tells slant,” Alison Stone writes in her ninth book of poems, Informed (New York Quarterly Books, 2024). In this stellar collection, Stone employs a variety of traditional forms through a strong feminist lens, addressing themes of loss, time and memory, the struggles of childhood, adolescence and dysfunctional family life, as well as sex, politics, pop culture, the lives of famous women, and the pandemic. The book is divided into four sections. The first and last sections are devoted entirely to pantoums, the second to ghazals; the third is…