Review by Kimberly Bowcutt A Daughter’s Work is Heartless by Nature, by Caledonia Kearns, elucidates the godlike wisdom and mortal labor required to forge a relationship between a mother and a daughter. Kearns crafts the language and symbolism in her poems with precision. She vividly conveys the moments of loss, pleasure, and joy which are inherent in the complex love between a mother and a daughter; moments that can make a mother feel like a goddess or remind her that she is completely and uselessly mortal. The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone informs both the structure of this…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa C. Taylor In this unique debut collection of prose poems, Callista Buchen, the author of two chapbooks of poetry. examines the darker side of pregnancy and motherhood. From the imperfect act of mothering to the loss of a baby, her poems dwell in the world of expectation, disappointment, and realism. It is the first book I’ve read about motherhood that posits the permanent and fleeting ways in which pregnancy alters a woman, for becoming a parent is, in itself, an act of transition. The violence of birth is manifested in a poem, “I can’t remember the…
Review by Sherre Vernon Shirley Camia is a Filipina-Canadian poet and the author of four poetry collections: Mercy; Children Shouldn’t Use Knives; The Significance of Moths; and Calliope. Her collection Children Shouldn’t Use Knives won the The Manuela Dias Book Design and Illustration Award in 2018. Mercy is a collection of poems that travels through a daughter’s journey of losing her mother. In the very first poem Camia tells us that the mother has begun a journey; by the fourth, we know she is bedridden; by the fifth, hospitalized. The entire collection continues down this timeline: hospital, death, a public…
M.A.M.A. Issue 39 – Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor Muttererde (2017) Video and Kimberly L. Becker – “Language Class” Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor Muttererde (2017) Video Muttererde profiles conversations with five black femmes on the knowledge and non-knowledge of their mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers and as far back as the knowledge carries them to create a rich and powerful archive on ancestry. They explore themes of motherhood, migration, cultural differences, beauty standards, queerness, kinship, death and rebirth. Their stories, although from five different countries, intertwine to weave a tapestry of herstory through the African diaspora. Through their testimonies, the viewer discovers…
Thanks to Rachel Thompson and Room Magazine’s Litmag Love podcast for the interview on Mom Egg Review’s commitment to literature of motherhood! Plus, what we look for in a submission. Listen here.
An interview with Marjorie Tesser was featured in a new mother-artists magazine, MILKED. Here’s some info about the magazine: Containing an intentionally curated body of work, conceptually driven and visually focused, MILKED is a new publication that focuses on the undertones of the maternal figure. Styled like a newspaper but published as a book, this full color, 8.5″ x 14″ publication features 76 pages of visual art, photography and the written word by international, female artists. MILKED is an independent project, initiated & curated by Lee Nowell-Wilson and designed by Darin Michelle. Both artists. Both mothers. For more info, or…
Review by Laura Dennis Single parenting can feel like a high wire act performed with no safety net, the empty platform forever just out of reach. Letting go of a bad marriage may have saved my soul and ultimately made me a better mom, but it can get pretty lonely up here. Enter We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor, a collection of poetry, essays, and quotes by writers both famous and less-known. In 2015, nearly two decades after her divorce, editor Marika Lindholm founded Empowering Solo Moms Everywhere (ESME). That community inspired the present…
Review by Emily Webber A Girl Goes into the Forest by Peg Alford Pursell shines light on the transitions and transformations we go through in life and the changing relationships between parents and children. In each of the 78 hybrid stories and fables in the collection, Pursell conjures up the magic and darkness of fairy tales. These stories span the times and places of a lifetime, showing how people seesaw between knowing and unknowing and from life to death. It is clear from the opening line in the first story that Pursell’s characters are searching: Tentative, curious, uncertain,…
Review by Kimberly Bowcutt Ana C. H. Silva’s recently published chapbook One Cupped Hand Above the Other is a perfect addition to her many existing published poems and artwork to elucidate her continued conversation that poetry is, as she said in a Spence School interview in 2017, “often about what we don’t know, what we’re trying to understand.” This collection explores the ways we try to make sense of the unseen forces that propel us through rites of passage. Silva’s use of metaphor, words that encapsulate multiple meanings, and divination symbolism all beautifully illuminate the moments of metamorphoses. The palmistry…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Haitian poet M.J. Fievre’s latest book, “Happy, Okay?” readers are catapulted on a journey through the psyche of a woman navigating mental illness. Though these poems punctuate anxiety and depression, they are also abundant in the redemptive power of hope and joy and just may, in the end, offer salvation. The first part of the book is arranged like a Greek play with a chorus of three characters involved in a sort of call and response format. Two of the characters are lovers, José Armando and Paloma, struggling to reconcile their life together and…