Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen For many people, the study of poetry is intimidating. Reading and writing poems reminds some of the onerous task they had to surmount in order to graduate from middle school. Thank goodness for clear-eyed writers who can actually create a book on how to compose poetry and how to really enjoy doing it, too. The title of Diane Lockward’s newest book The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics may, to some, be slightly misleading suggesting that this book is more suited for seasoned language mavens. Rest assured, however, this indispensable book is filled with…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson In this, Mary Meriam’s third full-length collection of poetry, dreams are as integral to reality as are expressions of longing, immersion with the preternatural world, and politics surrounding gender identity. Relying largely on a variety of forms to deliver wide-ranging content, this book invites the reader to consider and recast the paradigms of all things feminine. Early poems in the first section of the five that comprise the collection draw on dreamscapes for their potency, entreating in “Life Study” to Let me not list, let me not repeat. But come inside to my longing dreams…
Review by Michelle Everett Wilbert In this powerful and exquisite collection of poems, Jamie Wendt, a graduate of the University of Nebraska MFA program whose poetry has been published in various literary journals including Lilith, Raleigh Review and Minerva Rising, locates the interplay between the material and spiritual inheritance of land and people through themes of place, and displacement. In poems of vivid imagery and a strong, narrative voice, her experiences and questions are lived out while allowing that there is mystery that can only be accessed by the act of choosing, and choosing again, over a lifetime. Central…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn The airport monitor indicates George’s flight is on time and I think about what I’ll say to welcome him home. Love isn’t the first word to come to mind, which is, I suppose, progress. (“Salt and Blue” 11) I rarely pull my opening block quotes from the first story in a collection and have never, I believe, used the first two sentences. And yet, this has to be my choice for my review of Lisa C. Taylor’s IMPOSSIBLY SMALL SPACES: Carol’s reflection on progress—her emotional rehab from love to . . . something else—hands over what…
Review by Judy Swann One of the ways people respond to revolution in the arts is to ask, “But what does it mean?” Laurie Anderson, Alison Armstrong-Webber , Miranda July, Lily Gershon, Phillipe Petit, Raymond Queneau, and Gertrude Stein all got asked that question. And I’m sure Jessy Randall gets it too. So, it’s worth asking ourselves how much meaning matters. I personally feel that “meaning” in the commonly held and strictly denotative sense of “prose-equivalence” is over-rated. I wouldn’t call Jessy Randall’s diagram poems irrational, but they do not convey meaning the way, say, a number does or the way that…
Review by Lara Lillibridge “I’m a separated, co-parenting mom, a writer and an academic, who tends to struggle between two internal voices…” (8) Carley Moore’s essay collection, 16 Pills, is an exploration on what it means to be a single parent, a disabled child, a daughter, a teacher, a sister, a woman. The nonlinear essays vacillate between distant and near past: childhood, parenting, dating. She writes about diva cups, OKCupid, books, movies, art, Trump and the Pulse Nightclub shooting. Moore explores writing as a mother and the culture of shame that surrounds it: “It’s hard for women to tell the…
Margie Shaheed I met Margie Shaheed when I was teaching English literature at Rutgers-Newark in the early 1990s. Margie was returning to college as an adult student; in fact, we were close in age. She rocked my class with her inquisitive mind and passion for words. After she left Rutgers we stayed in touch and I watched her bloom as a community poet, deeply committed to writing about and sharing poetry with underserved communities. Her book Tongue Shakers, based on first-person interviews she conducted with immigrants, was born from several poems she published in the MER special issue on Mother…
Reviewed by Janet McCann Do you like poems about America’s past that evoke a Rockwellesque landscape, then curl up and scratch the back of your neck? I do. But if that’s what you are looking for, this collection isn’t it. Rather, it will grab you by the hair and pull you into a dark place in our history, and hold you hostage there. This is the most powerful representation of the Kitty Genovese murder that I have seen, and I have seen quite a few. I was a new college graduate when the murder happened, and could not believe that…
Review by Katrinka Moore In Efflorescence, Dawn Marar navigates borders — between America and the Middle East, between family and political life, between art and nature — and even crosses a border of language, inserting Arabic words among the English lines. She is an adventurous writer — both playful and complex — who views the world through the lens of conscience. These elements blend together to create a moving, cohesive poetry collection full of intelligence and attention to detail. Marar is adept at creating compelling juxtapositions. The opening poem, “Sparkles,” describes the parallels between the American-born speaker and…
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