Manny Vega As someone who has lived in Spanish Harlem for over a dozen years, my curiosity about the legendary Manny Vega, whose “Byzantine Hip-Hop” style lights up the neighborhood in murals all over El Barrio, has increased by the year. I finally got to meet Manny when he set up a mosaic teaching workshop for the community at a pop-up space provided by Hope Community, Inc. on 104th St. His warmth towards each child and parent who came through the door was notable and infectious, and he helped students produce over 50 mosaics of their own. As soon…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Anastacia-Reneé Mommy, Mommy, Mommy the airport kid has beautiful droopy eyes because he is sleepy & cold & at a weird place when he’s usually in his safe small car bed. the mom looks absolutely worn out & the older airport kid is practically singing: mommy mommy mommy mommy & she tells her airport husband they shouldn’t have gotten a red eye with the children & the droopy eye kid pulls on her shirt & says he has to poop & mommy mommy mommy mommy gets so upset because she’s with out & hungry & all out of snacks…
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz Weaning Today I said goodbye to you while “papa” held you atop the front porch, me below, blowing kisses and waiting for you to mimic my movements of palmed stretched hands from lips to air in your direction. Sometimes this works. “Bye bye baby,” I’ll say, then blow a kiss, wave. You’ll pucker at your palm and leave your flesh there to suck, smiling, forgetting to release the hand forward. Or with the hand that is wrapped around papa, you enclose your fist but very loosely, gathering the fingers in a ball, releasing again and again, so…
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie Writing Around the Edges “I learned to write around the edges.” Wanda Coleman I wake up every day at 4AM while the house is quiet. I write for three hours until the children wake up. I make them breakfast and take them to school. This is how I have written all of my books. (Bullshit.) I had a third baby and I don’t write much poetry these days. I write in my journal often. I do readings. I just got a box of my new poetry book Strut. After a long delay my first children’s…
J. Nicole Hill Thanks to him There are those sleepless nights The long sometimes ten hour days Always racing against time Until we meet soon again Picking my baby boy up from the babysitter Exhausted but somehow energized hearing your laugh as you play Then come running into the kitchen as I cook Your little arm wrapped around my leg I kiss you on your forehead Then back into the living room you run and play Amazed when you throw your carrots to the side of your high chair They were just his favorite the other day Making up…
TWO HYBRIDS FROM PEG ALFORD PURSELL GLORY, CLOUD, AND EGG The cloud holds some amount of the sea. All of the eggs of her daughter had been cradled within her too, the mother vessel. It’s just science. In fifth grade music class she had been taught to sing: in egg shells e day o. The lesson recurs in the chamber of her mind randomly. The sea sound in the ears should you shape your empty palms around them, that sea sound swish is on its own a sign of disease: a blocked carotid artery. Across the country the…
Mother Meets World in The Tornado is the World Review by Jennifer Key Catherine Pierce’s newest book The Tornado is the World (Saturnalia Books, 2016) follows her two previous collections The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012) and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. In The Tornado is the World (Saturnalia Books, 2016), Pierce, a Mississippi poet originally from Delaware, tackles that big slice of America known as tornado alley as her speaker reckons with the world, by turns chaotic, treacherous, and blessed, through a poetic sequence that loosely follows the events of a storm that touches…
Review by Judy Swann These stories are disturbing. They sizzle like hydrogen peroxide on an open wound. They unpack “Other” to a depth never explored before in the American short story (“Others,” as in what Ashis Nandy says, “What others can do to you, you can do to your own.”[1]) In Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s White Dancing Elephants, a psychiatric patient destroys her doctor, a father considers murdering his disabled daughter, a taxi-driver-turned-poet disappoints his family, and a manicurist embezzles her criminal employer’s money. And that’s not the half of it. Bhuvaneswar pits Indian-American against Korean-American, African against African-American, African-American against…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Lara Lillibridge is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction. In 2016, she won the Slippery Elm Literary Journals’ Prose Contest and the American Literary Review’s Creative Nonfiction Contest. She was a finalist in both the Black Warrior Review’s Nonfiction contest and the Disquiet’s Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Lillibridge’s memoir, Girlish, is a conjuring of a childhood spent with two sets of parents in two very different locations. The narrative primarily unfolds in the third person with a second person and a first person accounting interspersed. Written in…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In her new book, What Does Not Return, Tami Haaland’s poetry informs the reader that we are all intimately and inextricably tied to the natural world. The recognition of this interdependence is tightly woven throughout the book. Nature can impart many things and these poems ask us to pay attention to messages at once transcendent and temporal, visceral and ethereal. Haaland leads us through an array of vistas including oceans, mountains, high deserts and prairies. In the first section titled “Forgetting,” these disparate landscapes come alive and serve as backdrops to a mother’s dementia:…