– M.A.M.A. Issue 40 – Anna Perach, Art, and Jane Yolen, Poetry Anna Perach Anna’s practice is informed by the dynamic between personal and cultural myths. She explores how our private narratives are deeply rooted in ancient storytelling and folklore and conversely how folklore has the ability to tell us intimate, confidential stories about ourselves. In her work She synthesises female mythic characters and retell their stories while placing them in the current climate. By doing so Anna creates an experience of eeriness, evoking a sense of both familiarity and distress. Anna’s main medium of work is wearable sculpture…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Mindy Kronenberg What is it about the pressures of forgiveness that plagues and propels us? We live our lives in pursuit of knowledge, happiness, and love, and despite any accolades and earnest gestures toward fortifying our own humanity we manage to be detoured by the regret of our lesser moments and the challenges of our mortality. Chelsea Bunn hits several sensitive and familiar nerves with this eighteen poem collection that reveals and revisits the hope and grief that is threaded through rite-of-passage episodes. These involve missed opportunities, loss, violations (natural and self-inflicted) of the body and morale,…
Courtney Kessel – “In Balance With” and Other Works Courtney Kessel’s inventive collaborative works with her daughter Chloe use Kessel’s initial script or score, but rely on each performer’s interpretations and contributions. She notes, “I guess the best way to describe the work as collaborative is that it mimics our relationship and grows and changes accordingly.” Kessel reflects, “I enjoy giving her agency in the work and seeing where that goes.” In Making Up, her daughter had about an hour to select Kessel’s outfit and do her hair and make-up. Chloe has chosen to participate in each of their…
Review by Barbara Lawhorn In Laura Bernstein-Machlay’s gorgeous debut collection of essays, Travelers, readers journey with an extraordinarily honest author who inquires deeply into place, past, the people who inform us, and how these glimmering threads knot within our present selves. These essays hinge on journeying– to become, to depart and arrive—and, also, to make sense and meaning out of the moments that accumulate into rich, complex lives. Bernstein-Machlay holds up a mirror to her city, her family, and to herself as well, but dives beyond the reflective surface so that the reader must hold up the mirror to…
Review by Cammy Thomas Alison Stone has written three chapbooks, and six full-length collections of poetry, including Masterplan, a collaboration with Erik Greinke, and They Sing At Midnight, winner of the 2003 Many Mountains Moving award. Widely published, she is also a yoga instructor, a psychotherapist, and an artist, who designed a Tarot deck using her own paintings, and who painted the green Medusa on the cover of this book. She lives in upstate New York. Caught in the Myth is well-titled. Essentially every poem in the book is a brief meditation on a myth of some kind, from…
Review by Laura Dennis Back in graduate school, I discovered prose poet Francis Ponge, who famously said, “Another way of approaching the thing is to consider it unnamed, unnamable.” I was fascinated by his way of looking at the world, his wit, and his use of words. Sadly, I could not linger over his work, what with all the other titles on my reading list and the exams that loomed ahead. Ponge came to mind again, however, as I immersed myself in Sarah Wolfson’s début poetry collection, A Common Name for Everything. Although Wolfson’s work is very much its…
Review by Emily Webber Lisa A. Sturm’s debut novel, Echoed in My Bones, does not avoid the hard and complicated aspects of adoption, the foster care system, and dealing with past trauma. However, Sturm also manages to pull a thread of hope and love throughout the novel. At its core of Echoed in My Bones is about the decisions people make in order to survive and how those decisions echo through life. The novel highlights the difficult choices people make in order to survive, being caught up in the foster care system, growing up with an absent or drug-addicted parent,…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson The Book of Kells, by Barbara Crooker, opens with the evocative line, “Night opens its woven basket,” (3) from the poem “Samhain.” This was unexpected and delightful. Unexpected as when the “Introduction” describes the Book of Kells as one of the most spectacular examples of illuminated manuscripts and is “widely regarding as Ireland’s finest treasure,” (ix), I thought I’d be reading more traditionally analytical text. Delightful, as once I read those lines, I knew that Barbara Crooker would be using the powerful tools of poetry to explore and analyze this extraordinary document. Not that historical…
MER VOX Quarterly – Winter 2019 December, 2019 Sacred Spaces: A Poetry Folio Curated by Cindy Veach and Jennifer Martelli Featured Poets: Angelique Zobitz Anna V. Q. Ross Mary Buchinger Bodwell Allison Blevins Tina Kelley Adina Kopinsky Dayna Patterson Deborah Bacharach Jennifer Givhan
Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach In her poem, “We manage limited resources against unlimited needs,” Angelique Zobitz writes, So we cleave to one another tight as wet clothes plastered to damp bodies. The poems in this VOX folio explore the nature of this cleaving: the need for community and the spaces we create for this cleaving as mothers. This closeness—whether to a child, a partner, the reader, or a spirit—resonates in these poems with truth and language. Adina Kopinsky’s poem, “Holy Ground,” weaves the story of Moses with the story of motherhood as she reminds the…