Review by Mindy Kronenberg Ah, the kiss, a gesture so ingrained in our cultural imagination in so many guises. We have Rodin’s immortalized smooch elegantly rendered in marble; Klimt’s glittering, embracing couple; Romeo and Juliet’s tragic buss; fabled frogs turned princes with a peck; Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photo of a spontaneous clutch and smack of a sailor and nurse in Times Square celebrating V-J Day; the dreaded kisses of Judas and the God Father; the magical transformation in Craig Lucas’ play, A Prelude to a Kiss, of an ailing old man who kisses a bride on her wedding day; and Snoopy’s…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Geraldine Mills is a poet and fiction writer with five collections of poetry, three short story collections, and a children’s novel, Gold. Her numerous awards include the RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition, the Hennessey/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer Award, a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship and two Arts Council bursaries. She is a mentor with NUI Galway and a member of Poetry Ireland Writers in Schools Scheme. Her fiction and poetry are taught in Contemporary Irish Literature classes at the University of Connecticut, the University of Missouri, Emory University, and at the Emerson College Summer…
“As Far As Wishing Goes” Review by Cammy Thomas Melissa Crowe teaches in and runs UNC Wilmington’s MFA Program. Author of two chapbooks, Cirque du Crève-Coeur, and Girl, Giant, she has published widely, and is coeditor of Beloit Poetry Journal. This is her first full-length collection. Crowe grew up in Presque Isle, Maine, very far north, in a large, complicated, working-class family. Food was sometimes scarce, and quite a few people lived on the edge of hunger, violence, addiction. But there was also connection, and love. This powerful book progresses chronologically, beginning in childhood and extending to her own…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson I have a special place in my heart for “definition poems.” It’s what I call poems that take the idea to lay out the meaning of a word and repurpose that definition for their poem and often in doing so, subvert and shift the very definition. They are subtle and powerful, taking something so simple and recreating it. I was delighted to find a definition poem opening Latch, a collection of poems by Jen Stewart Fueston. And it’s a beautiful one. Latch sets us up for a complex web of poems, like the latching definition, “where…
Review by Sherre Vernon Tasslyn Magnusson’s chapbook Defining opens with “dreams of obliteration” (1) and closes with the short declarative sentence, “I speak” (22). Defining does not offer itself as a typical poetry collection. Framed by four lyric micro-poems, two in prologue, two in epilogue, Defining is an extended hermit-crab poem that defines eighteen seemingly unrelated words, in alphabetical order. Each word is offered as one or more parts of speech and provided a standard definition. In each lexicological entry, Magnusson uses Rare and Uncommon definitions, followed by example sentences with the defined word in context, to unfold the history…
Review by Michelle Wilbert As I read the first poem in this lovely collection by Shanna Powlus Wheeler, I was struck by two things: the sometimes harrowing pain of loss and grief that permeates the daily reality in which these poems were written, and the blending of various styles of poetry delicately worked in as one would choose stitches in fine needlework, or select pieces for a quilt intended as an heirloom. The poems blend the “Felt-Thought” of T. S. Eliot with the “Divine Humanity” of William Blake interwoven with the naturalistic prose-poem style of Mary Oliver—and this is no…
Review by Ellen Meeropol Although she dreams of being a jazz singer, entering the convent feels like a way for eighteen-year-old Mary Kaye O’Donnell to escape her dysfunctional family. That is, until she learns that she’s pregnant. The one person who could help Mary Kaye navigate an unwanted pregnancy in 1963 Chicago is her voice coach and mentor, Sister Michaeline, who dies suspiciously as Jean K. Carney’s luminous debut novel opens. Carney, a former award-winning reporter, editorial writer, and psychologist, offers a nuanced and powerful exploration of women’s choices around pregnancy and motherhood in the decades before Roe v. Wade.…
Review by Nancy Gerber “I’m done,” announces Maeve, the narrator of this compelling novel written in thirteen linked stories. And what mother hasn’t felt this way? Motherhood, the most demanding and impossible juggling act in the world—tending to the complicated, never-ending emotional needs of children, carpooling, cleaning, cooking, consoling, cajoling, working inside and outside the home, collapsing from exhaustion—all while trying to maintain one’s sense of humor and inner balance. Maybe master gardening and baking bread should be added to the to-do list. Of course, Maeve has only just begun to cope with life’s challenges when she makes her announcement.…
Issue 38 – October Casey Jenkins – sMother [Performance Art] and Amy Watkins, Poetry Casey Jenkins sMother psychological-endurance artwork. Gendered assumptions, judgments and advice – whether meant to protect or to control – bind and confine those perceived to be ‘women of child bearing age’, paralysing us with fear and shame. Our identities are subdued and mummified in forced acquiescence by community expectations that preserve absurd gender roles. At nearly 38 yo and after two miscarriages in the previous year, Casey performed sMother, the final in a trilogy of performances exploring the restrictive nature of gendered expectations on those…
Review by Laura Dennis The title of Eve F.W. Linn’s chapbook, Model Home, along with the dollhouse-like furniture on its cover, evokes coldness, mass production, lack of individuality. Then one looks at the cover again. Do the chairs and table sit on a carpet, or is this some sort of fathomless pool? And those pale pink flowers . . . are they floating? They certainly seem more than mere decorative weave. Intrigued, one opens the cover, finds the Anne Sexton epigraph, Out of used furniture, she made a tree. This may not be, one senses, what is typically thought…