Currents – March, 2019 Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s second award-winning book, Intersection on Neptune, winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, has been released. The collection of poems about life in New York and New Jersey is published by The Poetry Press of Press Americana. For more information, please visit www.donnajgelagotislee.com.
Author: Mom Egg Review
A Catalogue of Small Pains by Meghan L. Dowling Reviewed by Meghan O’Neill Packaged as a novel, Meghan L. Dowling’s debut A Catalogue of Small Pains unwraps into so much more. A quilted collection of lyrical vignettes, pamphlet excerpts, images and captions are sewn together into a multigenerational story of mothers, daughters and sisters, their struggle and trauma hidden from the world in a sometimes all too familiar way. “They gave us the viscera of these stories. Scrawled up in syllables, the words expanding, keening. A hundred years of filaments popping on the tip of a tongue” (8). Through her…
Throwback Thursdays by Margie Shaheed Review by Mindy Kronenberg There is something particularly poignant and wistful about reading a posthumous collection of poetry, and, in some cases, a bit startling when reviewing it. Margie Shaheed’s personal and evocative vignettes of growing up and into womanhood lift off the page with such vibrancy and immediacy that the reader immerses in each moment and rite of passage rather than simply being a witness to a series of intimate, narrative events. In these fifteen poems we feel the indignation, determination, bravery, and spirited persistence of a contemporary black woman who grappled with the…
Perdido by Elaine Terranova Review by Judy Swann Perdido, the word itself, is so many things: the title of this book, the title of a poem in this book, a sprightly jazz standard about squandered love, the Spanish adjective for “lost,” the name of a man who read his poems at the “North Star on Mondays,” (72) a street in the New Orleans Central Business District near what is now the Super Dome, and a thousand other riffs that are meaningful to me in my experience that may not be meaningful to you in yours. And that’s just the start…
Not For Nothing: Glimpses Into a Jersey Girlhood by Kathy Curto Review by Julia Lisella Set in the early 1970s on the south Jersey shore, adult women who came of age in the early 60s still get their hair done into beehives and their men listen to Jerry Vale and swear never to be seen in jeans. Little girls don Mary Janes and dance for their father’s paisans and regulars at Fred’s Texaco station. Families gather for Sunday dinners. But the story takes surprising turns as our narrator watches with dark and steady attention as mother and father split…
Love, Love, Love! We’re fans of romantic love, but there are innumerable other varieties. Our poets and writers explore the many facets of love in this folio. Love can be filial, parental, passionate, platonic. There are many ways to show love. We love you, our readers, and present this work to you with our love! Featured: Alexandra Beers Elizabeth J. Coleman Lorraine Currelley Jessica Feder-Birnbaum Kathy Kurz Mary Makofske Katie Manning Marcos Martínez
Marcos L. Martínez Amá (El Cruce) I. Puentes She drowned one once, caught its scraggly little feelers in the whoosh and spout of faucet, flushed its fragile alien body down the stainless-steel sink: black against silver, sliding and swirling down a whirlpool to oblivion. Black ants: each Spring return, crawl back into her kitchen, scurry to make ends meat for their own budding colony; sniffing out crumbs, tracing pheromone-trails in case they don’t return: calling forth siblings to some food- -rich new home. II. In This Other Country Sweep, mop, scrub, brush, wash, chop, toss, bake: her body whirled…
Elizabeth J. Coleman Two Subway Trains on Parallel Tracks The baby across the aisle in a yellow slicker flirts with me, eyes crossed in shyness, lodged in his mother’s safe embrace. He’ll forget me in a little while, ensconced safely in his mother’s arms, eyelashes lush as black silk strands, as I pass my childhood on the track next to us, that one running parallel but express, where seats are of a gold cane weave, and I ride with my mother, pretending to look like I can make out the words in her hard-cover book. You’re holding it upside down,…
Mary Makofske Jazz Duo Now our son learns to accompany a woman singing. Not too much amp, don’t step on her words. He takes his solos, or leaves them, they talk about key, where to start, how to end. The way her glance lights his face, everyone knows she’s singing the love songs to him. Their repertoire is straight from the standards book: I May Be Wrong, (But I Think You’re Wonderful). The sun didn’t shine Till There Was You. There were times when Dissonance was all, when he was lead guitar with no time for lyrics older than him.…
Katie Manning Love Poem with Teeth for Jon What would you do with it? you ask. I would keep it hidden in my jewelry box like a witch collecting body parts for a spell, I think. Then I go ahead and say that out loud. You laugh and look like you don’t believe I’m serious. Later, when we’ve waited for our son to be deep in dreams, we sneak into our own bedroom, you shining a screen light across our firstborn tucked into the sleeping bag where he begged to be on this special night. We negotiate in whispers— a…