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.
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 35th edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA. Natalie Ramus, Art With my exploration of the materiality of the body I attempt to connect with the innately performative body in view of it’s visceral, abject qualities. Through the re-presentation of bodily materials (such as hair or skin), that…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Janet Todd is an academic and novelist, known for her biographies of feminist writers as well as several novels. Todd was born in Wales and grew up in Bermuda, Sri Lanka, England, and Scotland. As an adult she worked in Ghana, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. before returning to Britain. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College. Janet Todd is also former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She co-founded Women’s Writing, the first journal devoted to early women writers. Radiation Diaries is a memoir written…
Carol Smallwood has been awarded the Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award for her lifetime work in writing, librarianship, education. Much of her work has the theme of women in her essays, anthologies, and poetry and she is grateful for Mom Egg Review in their dedication to helping so many women and mother writers like her. https://wwlifetimeachievement.com/2018/12/12/carol-smallwood
It’s Complicated… A folio curated by Marjorie Tesser As mothers, we are involved in the business of nurture. Sometimes this goes smoothly; motherhood can be a source of love and joy. But at other times, mothering can be complicated. Signals can be interrupted, misinterpreted. Mothers and children can be imperfect. There is disappointment, illness, loss. Often these are the things we are most reluctant to talk about. In this folio, writers confront, explore, and reveal complications of motherhood. They address the difficult topics of frustration, misapprehension, grief, and loss, and explore their intersections with mothering. These fraught topics are also addressed…