Review by Emily Webber Hotel Impala, Pat Spears’s third novel, tackles a trio of American catastrophes—mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. Her work typically features characters on the margins of society, who many would label as failures and deadbeats, always presented with care, humor, and hard truths. This novel, layered with many different perspectives, shows the complex web mental illness creates over six-year period in the Killian family. The rhythm of the family, whether things are good or bad, is dictated entirely by Leah, who is mentally ill and experiencing psychotic episodes. Her husband, Daniel, struggles to keep up the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Rebecca Jane A Slow Indwelling features two courageous voices that confront pain with poetry. Megan Merchant, a recent winner of the New American Book Prize and author of Hortensia, in Winter weaves her insights about blood, longing, and wreckage with those of Luke Johnson, a father who lives on the California coast, is the author of Quiver, and was a finalist for the Robert Frost residency. A Slow Indwelling proves that deep conversation between two people, conversation that can explore the revelatory and the dark, is still alive and possible in this age of division and insanity.…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Adrie Rose’s Rupture arrives at a time of profound concern for women’s health issues, and her journey of dealing with an ectopic pregnancy brings a poignant and painful lens to the intricate and intimate details of a life set off-course by a series of startling personal events. With bravery and eloquence, the poet revisits exasperating moments and memories, where the body and desire are betrayed unexpectedly, and the self forges a quiet but determined path forward. The title itself implies a bursting or breach, whether in the body or of our certainty of being loved. There’s…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor With breathtaking originality, Those Absences Now Closest propelled this reader into the visceral world of war and the generational trauma that no one whose ancestry has been victimized can escape. Poet and translator, Dzvinia Orlowsky recycles excerpts from other poets and writers including Oleksandr Dovzhenko, whose work she translated. The cento form is composed of passages taken from other poets and she utilizes this form skillfully. The Desna River runs through both Russia and Ukraine which makes it an apt symbol of connection and separation. Some tributaries are in Russia and some in Ukraine.…
Review by Connie Jordan Green Linda Parsons, native Tennessean, is an editor and a prolific writer of poetry, essays, and plays. To come upon a volume of Parsons’ work is to know one is in for a pleasant, but thought-provoking, visit with a master of the written word. Parsons’ sixth collection, Valediction, a book of poems and small essays dedicated to her “three parents, passed but ever present,” is a treasure trove of details and precise images, the product of a reflective mind sifting through memories from childhood and from the recent past. From the opening poem “Light Around…
Review by Linda McCauley Freeman There is an almost indescribable moment when you first nudge your way into a hoarder’s house. An assault not only of your senses, but also of the very foundation of reality, stability and yes, sanity. About five years ago, I felt that sensation when I tried to open the door to my 90-year-old aunt’s apartment in Queens. I had no inkling of what was to come, no clue to prepare me when the door wouldn’t open more than a foot and I had to slide in sideways. In Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s memoir, Lost Found…
MER Bookshelf – February 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Julia C. Alter, Some Dark Familiar, Green Writers Press, April 2024, poetry Julia C. Alter’s Some Dark Familiar begins as an excavation of the shadow sides of motherhood– often hidden from plain sight and public view. In the collection, Alter turns an unflinching eye on postpartum depression, maternal ambivalence, pregnancy termination, and the complex weaving of sexuality with motherhood. However, the author knows that no shadows are cast without light. Some Dark Familiar also seeks to illuminate the reclaiming of erotic power/true selfhood after giving birth. By the close…
For an online folio, MER is seeking poetry submissions on “Mothering Alone.” Please see notice below for details. Submit by 2/15/25.
U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo Life Quiver I think I felt my daughter speak to me whisper her presence in the depths of my core felt her name bubble in my mind Shamiso her brown angelic face showing herself through the tears the pull of an atom about to split in my chest I am bursting my blood watering the field garden from where she may grow If her roots are strong enough If my soil is filled with the magical possibility of this bliss am I ready to hear her gurgle, while I write and perform this poem of her inception in…
MER Bookshelf – January 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Dzvinia Orlowsky, Those Absences Now Closest, Carnegie Mellon University Press, October 2024, poetry. In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to “cut yourself with a dull razor.” She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching. Keetje Kuipers, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, BOA Editions, April 2025, poetry. The…