Chelsea Fanning Virgin Mary as Teakettle Praise be to you, spattered with chicken grease and garlic fat, the cerulean of your enamel like a blue mantle, sanguine in its austerity. Down your throat holy faucet waters pour, impregnating your belly before you’re cast into the flames. Blue light caresses your sides heats up the sea inside you, tempest waves rising to a fever until you scream in ecstasy or terror. Originally published in MER 20, “Mother Figures” issue. Chelsea Fanning is a writer, poet, editor, feminist, witch from New Jersey. She has an MFA from Drew University…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Winner of the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Flutter, Kick is a taut new collection that vaults between a Zenlike focus on moments, and meanderings that alter what is seen. Divided into four sections, the collection opens with the poem House. This poem twists its way from a memory to the history of a house where …”someone attached a lock/on her bedroom door and didn’t say why…” (p. 11) Like many of the poems that follow, the first section sets up a dark history of a place attached to a childhood memory. In some poems,…
THE YELLOW TOOTHBRUSH Kathryn Gahl interviewed by Leslie Lindsay What does a mother do the day after she visits her daughter in prison? How does a mother reconcile—find compassion—for a person who is guilty of the unthinkable? What if that daughter, like you, is also a nurse, a mother reeling from abandonment by her husband and her father, what then? What if that daughter, when struck by the perils of perinatal mood disorder, committed filicide? For award-winning, multi-genre writer Kathryn Gahl, these aren’t questions to be taken lightly. Forgiving and loving aren’t options, they are ‘built-in.’ The Yellow Toothbrush…
Review by Yvonne Higgins Leach Katy Ellis’ book-length prose poem Home Water, Home Land has all the ingredients that make for an engaging read: inspiring settings, unexpected turns, and character growth. I read the book in one sitting, turning each page to keep learning more about the narrator’s journey of breaking away, of experiencing new borders of land and water, new relationships, and questioning what she truly desires. I read each page relishing the beautiful language, the poetry of life. The book is written as an entire prose poem. At first that can seem overwhelming, but Ellis organized it…
Review by Olivia Kate Cerrone In the title poem that opens Julia Lisella’s latest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, the lived life that was once familiar is “now broken into village plots that others love to visit.” Reshaped by grief, memories take on new associations, evoking startling possibilities and insights in a narrative terrain where “almost anything can grow here—even last year’s annuals come shunting through with a tiny roar.” Lisella’s elegant and vividly rendered poems are wise, compassionate, and far-reaching in their scope, interweaving haunting themes on what is endured and sustained through seasons of motherhood and marriage, beloved…
Reborn of Secrets and Teeth: A Review of Kimberly Ann Priest’s Slaughter the One Bird by Jessica L. Walsh There will be diseased houses, God tells Moses and Aaron in Leviticus, before recounting to them the complex steps needed to purify a dwelling. When a priest finally deems the house clean, he will sanctify it through the ritual of two birds: slaughter the first bird over a vessel, dip the living bird in its blood, and cast the blood through the house seven times. Thus, in the story of the two birds, one does indeed survive—but does so awash in…
Shared Breath: Motherhood in the Time of Climate Crisis Megan Jacobs Shared Breath: Motherhood in the Time of Climate Crisis, explores environmental grief through a twin-lens investigation: the interconnection of motherhood and climate crisis. Our collective loss in thinking of the Earth as a “mother”—who both provides for humans and should be cared for—has had devastating effects on the planet. My family and I live in New Mexico and these changes have become personal and visceral as we breathe in smoke from the largest wildfire in NM history. We must learn to acknowledge a “shared breath” with our environment. My…