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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Review by Nicelle Davis The Odyssey Reimagined: A Review of Odysseus’ Daughter by Cammy Thomas Odysseus’ Daughter by Cammy Thomas offers a fresh and intimate retelling of The Odyssey, presenting the legendary tale through first-person narratives that breathe new life into its characters. In the first section of the collection, Thomas gives voice to figures often overlooked in the original epic, reshaping the perspective and adding complexity to the well-known story. These poems reveal a surprising humanity in the so-called monsters. Even the Sirens, whose haunting voices lure sailors to their doom, confess: “We don’t breathe, but / still…
Review by Amanda K. Jaros As a mother, backpacker, and nature lover, I’ll pick up any book on these themes. It’s rare to find a book that covers all three. So, I was delighted to read Andrea Lani’s Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail, a story that melds together my favorite topics with insight, creativity, and depth. Like all mothers, Lani loves her children with everything she’s got. Like many mothers, working an unfulfilling job and raising kids is simply not enough and Lani dreams of shaking up the status quo. Referring to Cindy Ross’s…
Mother / Writer-Artist: MER Literary Folio In this mixed-genre folio, poets and writers explore the mother and writer identities, their characteristics, confluences and conflicts. (Fun tip: read the excerpted lines as a poem or two). Prose Brittany Ackerman, “Big Splashes, So Big” . . . what it’s like with your child, this feeling of having to pry something open so you can exist. Jennifer Case, “Things People Tell Me When I Write About Motherhood” From an editor in NYC (as well as an old boss): “Sorry. I’m not a ‘parenting person.’” Maggie Cramer and Emily Cramer,…
Jennifer Case Things People Tell Me When I Write About Motherhood From an esteemed essayist I have long admired: “Yes, we need to talk more about what women gave up when they left the home.” In a cream envelope, containing a Xerox copy of an 1860s parenting manual, instructions on how to hold a baby properly to reduce colic and keep the baby happy: “Maybe these will help you.” Scribbled in the margins on an essay about loneliness and online parenting forums: “Post-Partum Depression?” From someone who clearly has never had a child in daycare: “The writing is strong…
Derek Davidson Medium Start with blue, a cadmium wash spilling through Mom’s studio window, covering drafting table, stool, bookshelves, blue a patina before Mom registers the incoming dark and turns on the light. Then a click of the lamp and dimensionality, fullness; our cones take over again, rounding objects, coloring the room though softly, no solid lines separating things. Books, chair, stool, brushes spiking like Spanish bayonet from a coffee mug—all share shadows, blending into everything else a little, the room keeping its evening-dim, shaded and Baroque. This is fifty years ago, Baltimore. My memory’s doubtless gotten more wrong…
Amy Gallo Ryan Water’s Edge Fifteen fingers worm through mine, burrowing and squirming as they pull hard for leverage. My kids and I are always touching, it seems, but today the physicality has a kind of kinetic fervor. The shrieking, the seizing, delighting in the danger of water chasing us down and sand shifting underfoot. “Here comes another one!!!!!!!” The waves are no more than whispers of foam by the time they reach us, my children’s response preposterously outsized, but I understand that their experience of it is real. Their little nervous systems, still so new, have been overloaded,…