Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering, and Travel Edited by Charlotte Beyer, Janet MacLennan, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Marjorie Tesser Review by Stephanie May de Montigny In Travellin’ Mama each of us likely will find something that resonates with our own experiences of the challenges and joys of travelling as mothers. But every reader also will find something new through which they may learn about different lives and perspectives, both past and present. Edited by Charlotte Beyer, Janet MacLennan, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Marjorie Tesser, this diverse collection assembles essays, poetry, and scholarly analyses, all centered around mothers’ experiences of traveling…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson Released in late April 2019, The Dancing Clock by Nancy Gerber is a collection of related essays on the passage of time viewed through a gorgeous prism of her personal experience. They are intimate and profound and jump from the biggest questions—how humans survive trauma—to the next biggest—how we become more than the roles assigned for us, mother, daughter, wife, friend. Gerber suggests in the opening Prologue we do this when we acknowledge our mortality and dance with life. She asks us to join her in acceptance and through that, in a new sense of…
“Nothing Was Simply One Thing” The Bones of Winter Birds by Ann Fisher-Wirth Review by Cammy Thomas Ann Fisher-Wirth is an accomplished writer, scholar, and Fulbright recipient. A professor at the University of Mississippi, she has written many books of poetry and prose, including co-editing The Ecopoetry Anthology with Laura-Gray Street (Trinity UP, 2013). The Bones of Winter Birds is her most recent book of poems. I read this book with an eerie sense of recognition. Like Ann Fisher-Wirth, I have lived in Mississippi, learned French, loved Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, had a mysterious sibling, been to the…
Review by Barbara Lawhorn Dedicated to her mother, who passed away nearly a year earlier, and organized in four sections, Lisa Hase-Jackson’s Flint and Fire is a journey of seeking, actively becoming, leaving, returning to, and fashioning anew a sense of home in an unfamiliar terrain. The poems are rooted by the credible, nuanced voice of a first-person speaker, who reflects upon and acutely observes the world, while trying to determine her own place in it. Hase-Jackson’s attention to the natural world, and the speaker’s own rich internal landscape, provide for narrative poems that expand beyond their measured stanzas,…
Review by Lara Lillibridge The winner of Dzanc’s 2018 Nonfiction Prize, Knock Wood is the first work of nonfiction by Jennifer Militello, whose previous honors include the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize, and the Tupelo Press First Book Award. This book centers on intertwined elements: a mentally ill aunt in an abusive marriage, a criminal high school sweetheart who eventually dies of a heroin overdose, Militello’s life as a mother and her aunt’s experience raising her daughter, and an extramarital affair. Events appear to influence each other regardless of chronology. There could be no outcome. There…
Review by Carole Mertz It’s a welcome experience to discover so fine a collection of contemporary poetry written entirely in sonnet form. Kairos is a remarkable volume whose voice also reflects the training and inclinations of a classical musician. From the opening piece, “Anachronism,” onward, Libby Maxey presents poem after poem in uniformly skillful handling of form and meter. Maxey won the 2018 New Women’s Voices Competition by Finishing Line Press, for which the collection was created. Its charming cover depicts a branch in bud. “In the sanctuary, Amherst” tells of a musical situation: a rehearsal has just ended,…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez The Shame of Losing, Sarah Cannon’s debut memoir, opens with her reaction to horrifying news: an accident at work has left her husband, Matt, clinging to life. The twin arcs of Matt’s physical recovery and the dissolution of their marriage follows. This book leaves readers with a profound sense of how one second can change the life of a family forever. I found a lot to admire in Cannon’s work. The hospital scenes, that show her reacting to the news of Matt’s traumatic brain injury, which happens just days before his 33rd birthday, gripped me. Cannon…
Review by Marjorie Tesser Raised in an observant Jewish household, Sarah Lightman realized that her biblical namesake, matriarch of her people, did not have a book of the bible named for her. In recognition and remedy, Lightman has named her book The Book of Sarah. The book is an idiosyncratic coming of age memoir in words and pictures, beginning at age ten. The quest for identity is a continuing thread as the narrative traces the author’s spiritual, social, and psychological evolutions in conjunction with her development and identity as an artist and, eventually, a feminist, mother and partner. Physically,…
Chasing the Merry-Go-Round: Holding on to Hope & Home When the World Moves Too Fast Author’s Note By Kelly Bargabos My heart has always been to tell the story of my brother, Bobby, so that people could see what life is truly like for someone like him. In a culture that has historically valued strength over weakness, intellect over character, and accomplishment over a simpler life, a segment of our population is systemically and repeatedly marginalized—unseen and unheard. When someone has physical disabilities that are invisible and intellectual limitations that aren’t always obvious, life is challenging in ways that most…
Chasing the Merry-Go-Round: Holding on to Hope & Home When the World Moves Too Fast by Kelly Bargabos Review by Laura Dennis Halfway into Chasing the Merry-Go-Round, I thought this was yet another story of someone (the author-narrator) trying to help someone else (her brother) without that person being ready to help himself. Knowing from personal experience that such efforts almost always fail, I wondered how it would end. Then came the suggestion of an explanation, followed by two diagnoses—Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and narcolepsy. I had fallen into the same trap as the author herself once had. I…