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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Lisa Marie Oliver, Birthroot, Glass Lyre Press, December 2024, poetry (chapbook) The poems in Birthroot explore themes of new motherhood, loss, renewal and the natural world. This chapbook follows the first months of pregnancy, through birth and toddlerhood—a time period that includes the loss of marriage, postpartum anxiety, wildfires, and family grief. Throughout the poems, the link between mother and child is revelatory, transformative and rooted in the natural world that surrounds them. Rebe Huntman, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, Monkfish Book Publishing, February 2025, creative…
Review by Melanie McGehee In her latest book, Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell, long-time educator and writer, finally tells her own story. Her prior books celebrate the lives of what might be considered ordinary working people. In them, she honors millworkers, farmers, and blacksmiths, particularly those of the post World War generations that she’s familiar with in North Carolina and Virginia. In Otherwise, I’m Fine, Presnell continues highlighting what is quite ordinary—ordinary, as in common—as she unpacks grief and family estrangement. When her father died in 1969, Barbara Presnell was fourteen years old. Her older sister was in high…
Review by Christy Lee Barnes In Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, an atheist’s prayers conjure up snakes and possums. Snakes, her deepest fear. And a possum, whose “deep blue / milk, lets her babies / cling to her opalescent / pelt warm and lunar.” I open with that image to give a glimpse into the wonderfully fierce strangeness of this collection. Again and again, the poems pull readers into a sharp, surprising, and ultimately beautiful world, past the ordinary and down to a weirder land full of honesty, pain, humor, and strength. In her concise, gripping…
Review by Lara Lillibridge A good poem is a fleeting emotion captured and held on a page, then released into the heart of the reader to linger. And as women and mothers, we need that pause in our day to escape our lives, our politics, our families and coworkers and just honor what it is be a mother: wounded, worried, strong and too often alone in our pain. But the poetry reminds us that we are not alone. We are connected to all the other mothers, whether we share their experiences or not. We relate. And Alyssa Sinclair’s Venus…
Review by Celia Jeffries “Throughout my journey of motherhood, there have been moments when I wanted to check out. That’s it. I’m done. These were moments when I was sleep-deprived, I was seeing stars behind the actual objects I was looking at.” (185) This admission comes late in Trinh’s book, after she has achieved everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. After she has taken the reader from her Buddhist upbringing through her travels to sacred sites around the world, her marriage and her struggle to combine motherhood with career and her sense that…