I was not given meaning, so I had to make it By Jiwon Choi I can’t say that I was feeling overtly political during the drafting of A Temporary Dwelling, my third poetry collection (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), but I do acknowledge that I am distrustful of the Mainstream Culture seeing how it tries to jam unhelpful messages through my keyhole. A slightly contradictory statement coming from someone whose childhood was taken up with voraciously imbibing what the MC had to offer, primarily in TV form whilst waiting for the parents to get home. Yes, I was a child in…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley New and coming soon: notable books with a focus on motherhood and women’s lives. Joan Kwon Glass, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Perugia Press, September 2024, poetry. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent questions: What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating…
Review by Jordan E. Franklin For those of you new to Sarah Sarai, she is a NYC-based poet and editor with a prolific publication record spanning several collections. While most poets experience a lag in their work and output, Sarai has experienced no such thing as evidenced by her latest book, Bright-Eyed. This new work manages to retain its power, intimacy, and tenderness despite its brevity. According to Dictionary.com, the word “geography” refers to “the topographical features of a region.” Normally, this pertains to physical spaces such as countries and landscapes; Sarai begins Bright-Eyed with a dedication to her…
Review by Elizabeth Brown The Fiction of Stillness is Robyn Hunt’s second collection of poems. Her first collection, The Shape of Caught Water, was published by Red Mountain Press in 2013, winning the New Mexico Press Women’s Association Award in 2014. Additionally, Ms. Hunt has co-written a one-act play with Evangeline Brown which was produced by Theaterwork in Santa Fe, as well as published numerous poems in literary journals. This collection details all aspects of a cancer diagnosis and struggle to beat it. Organized into three sections, the poems highlight the ups and downs of the journey of the…
To you who took flight suddenly: a review by Jennifer Jean In her introduction to Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960-2023, editor Mojdeh Bahar tells us that the jay in the title is a desert crow that is camouflaged while marching on its stout legs but is expressively gorgeous when taking flight. This image is an apt representation of the poets in this exquisitely curated bilingual anthology of Persian poetry by women from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Bahar, in her introduction, and the poets as well, talk of taking refuge in the soaring words…
Review by Jane Ward Imagine walking along a pier with your children. Your daughter points to something, a bird circling the ocean, perhaps, searching for fish. Your eyes leave your young son for one minute, or less–an instant. When you turn back to smile at him, he is gone. Every parent’s nightmare–that a moment’s lapse can result in a forever tragedy–is the premise that launches Cynthia Reeves’s exquisite novel, The Last Whaler, a tale that unfolds within the world of 20th-century Norwegian whaling, against the backdrop of a relentless and unforgiving Arctic. In 1937, whaler Tor Handeland and his…
Sarah Browning Borrowing Happiness from Tomorrow It’s so dry this year the sycamores are shedding their enormous leaves, palms of crackle and nerve littering the yard mid-August, while exhaust from futuristic mowers the city hauls from rec center to rec center hangs gray over our neighbor Joan’s roses; we require the morning – the atmosphere, we say – to absorb it all faultlessly: noise, exhaust, our fecklessness. I woke at 5 this morning. It’s cooler for a change. We’d thrown the windows wide in celebration and as I fretted my bladder and whether to wrench my suddenly old and…
Review by Laura Dennis The expression “mom in space,” might bring to mind a woman suffering from “mom brain,” COVID brain fog, or some combination thereof. The cover of Lisa Ampleman’s third full-length poetry collection, however, indicates we are talking about actual space, as in outer space, an impression confirmed by the opening epigraph from Diane Ackerman’s space-opera, The Planets. That is not to say that other notions of space are absent from Mom in Space. Quite the contrary: it appears in myriad forms, as do varying takes on motherhood, rendering “mom in space” a highly polysemic expression, full…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Perhaps it was serendipitous that Barbara Crooker’s evocative and engaging book of poems on the rewards and ravages of aging landed in my hands as I approach my seventieth year. Like many of a certain age, I began to watch, with both wonder and wistfulness, how the abundance and ease of life reverses itself slowly and slyly— the dwindling of friends and intimates, the increased challenges within the corporeal realm. This is not to say that Crooker’s observations are dire or maudlin; her poetic acumen is cautious but gracious, and not without humor on occasion.…
Submissions on Medical Motherhood MER Online folio open 7/15-8/5 For an MER Online folio themed “Medical Motherhood” guest edited by Sarah Dalton, MER seeks poems, fiction, and prose centered on the experiences of mothers and parents of children with disabilities and/or children with complex medical needs. ***Submit flash prose or up to 3 poems; hybrid works are welcome, however the submission’s total word count should not exceed 1000 words Submissions open July 15 and close August 5 EDT. Simultaneous submissions okay; unpublished work only please. If you need to contact us, you may do so at [email protected]. We look…