Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger Dorinda Wegener’s debut poetry collection, Four Fields, is at once brave and vulnerable. She exposes all aspects of parent/child relationships, with the speaker’s mother, then father, in her richly written poetry. Although approachable, these poems require time to parse and readers may benefit from multiple readings to experience the book completely. Still, Wegener’s words warrant wallowing in for some time. Divided into four parts, there is a metaphor centered in agriculture. Section I focuses on the mother figure, and the relationship between this mother and daughter—including the good, the complicated, and the painful aspects.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Meghan Sterling Contending with Ghosts: The Tapestry of Place and Loss in Abbie Kiefer’s Certain Shelter A few months ago, a fellow Maine poet reached out to me to ask if I would be willing to read her latest collection, Certain Shelter, thinking my residence in her hometown might be of interest. She was right—reviewing a collection that takes place in the town I now call home was an interesting read. But there was more here than connection to place. I read Abbie Kiefer’s manuscript with recognition and urgency, exploring each poem hungrily. Like Kiefer, I am…
Review by Sharon Tracey Canticle for Remnant Days is Jane C. Miller’s first full-length poetry collection and she has compressed a lifetime within its pages. The poems are a measuring, a looking back and then forward, marking the days, the longing and joy; where loves goes, where it’s raised. Childhood, marriage, children, love, and loss. The self ever changing. The book, divided into four sections of roughly equal length, evoke the seasons and rhythms of change. Many poems are tinged with color and there’s the sensation of a light touch, memory as brushstroke. Time is a star subject and…
MER Open for Submissions for MER Vol. 23 Print Journal and MER Online Quarterly MER – Mom Egg Review is open for submissions. 4/24 – 5/1 Free Early Bird Submissions (until we reach our Submittable limit) 4/24 – 7/15 Regular Submissions ($3) Submit 3 poems or up to 1000 words of fiction or nonfiction. This is an un-themed issue, so any work focused on some aspect of motherhood, mothering, or mothers is welcome. View our guidelines and submit here: https://themomegg.submittable.com/submit We can’t wait to read your best work!
Jacquelyn Grant Brown For Black Mothers Who Can’t Consider Sleep Cuz the World Still Ain’t Safe Enuf Her son makes it home +++safely after the late shift only to find her there +++again, twisted deep into the contour her body has carved permanently into the right corner cushion of the couch from a ritual of waiting up for him. Before the bright orange of morning can come calling on her dusky lights from the den’s TV dance over the tiniest creases in her face, telling details of an angst-filled and laborious life. She wars with her eyelids every late…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Highley Hollay Ghadery, Widow Fantasies, Gordon Hill Press, September 2024, fiction (short stories). The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women. https://www.gordonhillpress.com/products/widow-fantasies Patricia Caspers, The Most Kissed Woman in the World, Kelsay Books, April 2024, poetry. There is so much beauty in Patricia Caspers’ The Most Kissed Woman in the World, and…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader Writer and engineer Tara Isabel Zambrano debuted with her flash and short story collection Death, Desire, and Other Destinations from OKAY Donkey Press in 2020. Her second collection Ruined a Little When We Are Born (Dzanc Books, October 2024) arrives swathed in sensuous details—the food, clothing, customs, culture, and gods of India—and sprinkled with the extraordinary and the unusual, all to describe the otherwise most indescribable of human characteristics: emotions and feelings. The sensuality of her writing is—perhaps unsurprisingly, yet it is a rare quality—especially striking in her depictions of sex, the before…
Review by Margaret Sáraco Genevieve Betts’ second poetry book, A New Kind of Tongue, follows her debut, An Unwalled City (Prolific Press). Betts, an assistant professor of English at Sante Fe Community College, also teaches creative writing for Arcadia University’s low residency MFA program in Glenside, PA. The author takes us on a journey transitioning from living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to her new home in Sante Fe, New Mexico. It is no small task to move from New York to Arizona with her family, but this is only part of her story as she searches for understanding in…
Review by Diane Gottlieb No one would accuse Rachel Zimmerman of burying the lede. Here’s how she starts “Widow,” chapter one of her riveting memoir Us After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide: If I were writing a news story, I’d start like this: On July 1, 2014, Seth Teller, MIT professor and father of two, parked his crimson Honda Insight on the Tobin Bridge, three miles from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and jumped to his death (5). A former journalist, Zimmerman knows the importance of providing the facts—up front. As a memoirist,…
Review by Janet McCann Theophany is an encounter with a deity that manifests in an observable and tangible form. These encounters are described in many religious texts and are part of the spiritual life. In this work, glimpses into the spiritual dimension define a distinctive angle of vision. Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies, which was selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Djanikian Scholar, Stadler Fellow, a 2022-23 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and winner of the 2022 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, she has published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and…