Kathy Kurz Flesh “This is for you, Mom.” My youngest daughter, Julia, is home from college for the first time proudly showing me ‘my’ tattoo—sprays of lilacs and dogwood blossoms covering her shoulder. I try to be pleased. She explains: the lilacs are for me, my favorite flower, and the dogwood’s for home, because of the one in our front yard she loved to climb. I tell her it’s beautiful, and it is, but secretly I mourn the smooth, clear skin those flowers erased. Reality shifts as my sweet Julia joins the crowd of others linked in my mind with…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Lorraine Currelley Under The Bridge on Saturday mornings mama would dress us children and take us under the bridge. under the bridge was our name for the marketplace in spanish harlem located under a bridge. it was also known as la marqueta. it was made up of rows and rows of one story buildings. in these buildings were the finest fruits, vegetables, poultry, meats, produce, colorful clothing and goods for the house. a trip under the bridge was a magical adventure for us children. what i loved most about under the bridge was mama. i loved watching mama shop. mama’s…
Alexandra Beers Henry at the Hair Salon My 14 years’ son sits in salons admiring himself, discussing intently his intentions with cowlicks and product and natural wave. I indulge this vanity. Not like my own mother who saw but did not see my brother longing for attention, accessories, even makeup– Bowie his idol, Halloween his favorite night. Pinks plaids earrings hats clogs! He never found enough. Now his young doppleganger searches the mirror for clues how to be. How to live in fair skin and pride. How to be earnest, intimate. Years earlier, kids had shouted, You’re gay! I assured…
MER Editor Marjorie Tesser is excited to announce that the volume she co-edited for Demeter Press with Charlotte Beyer, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Janet MacLennan will be published this March. “Don’t women with children travel?” Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael enquire, in their book A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart (1998), when discovering the absence of portrayals of travelling mothers. Addressing this absence, our book Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel explores the multiple dimensions of motherhood and travel. Through a variety of compelling creative pieces and critical essays with a global outlook and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and national…
Barbara Crooker’s eighth book of poetry, The Book of Kells, focuses on the illuminated medieval manuscript with a series of meditations on its various aspects, from the ink and pigments used by the scribes and illustrators to the various plants, animals, and figures depicted on its pages, including the punctuation and use of decoration in the capital letters.
Review by Lisa C. Taylor In Knitting the Fog, a poetic accounting of the immigrant experience, the author, as a child, faces daily trials during the three-year absence of a mother illegally making her way to the United States. A series of “coyotes” were employed to ferry her mother from place to place until she reached her destination of El Norte. Her three daughters, Consuelo, Sindy, and Claudia stayed behind, with Sindy acting as a second mother to seven-year-old Claudia. The emotional impact of this absence is deftly rendered through the eyes of Claudia, and the changing landscape. Young…
Review by Julie L. Moore Litany for Wound and Bloom, the fourth collection of poems by Oregon Book Award winner Judith H. Montgomery, is like “Another Kind of Prayer” (one of her poem’s titles), as it both raises excruciating questions—“If in the beginning was the Word then what / of ending— stutter? then silence?”—as well as expresses women’s pain and praise in exquisite language (45). As a follow-up to her previously acclaimed work, Litany for Wound and Bloom incisively explores themes related to infertility and motherhood, oppression women face, and old age, all with painstaking precision. Organized into three sections,…
Carol Levin’s third full volume, just released, “An Undercurrent of Jitters” from MoonPath Press. An odyssey into multiple facets of the subject of marriage. Within: laws, history, culture, rules, religion, commerce, gender, expectations, outcomes and personal dramas.
Review by Judy Swann There’s almost no book as suited to republishing (in another year, in another format) than Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. First published in 2014, it is Gee’s twelfth novel. In 2012, after her eleventh novel, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire and is henceforth Dame Maggie Gee. In 2014 when the hard cover version of Virginia Woolf in Manhattan appeared, it was longlisted for the prestigious Folio Prize. There is some evidence that the hard cover of Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is not completely identical to the paperback; published reviews indicate that…
Review by Carole Mertz Sorensen’s Sure Poetic Hand Each section of Sorensen’s well-organized poetry collection bears its gracefully appointed epigraph. (She quotes Eliot, Pound and Kafka). I enjoy reflecting on how her appreciation of these early 20th Century romantics, and her experience of Colorado floods, have influenced her work. There is a prominent strain that flows through these poems: the deep, roiling rumblings of loss, and loss of a child, in particular. Perhaps this is only a poetic persona, I tell myself, but reading through the volume I become convinced, sadly; the poet has suffered real, personal loss. Indeed, had…