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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
About “The Anxious Child’s Alphabet” by Kendra Keefer-McGee
Morals by Abigail Walthausen What can I give without Joseph, Doula and sheepwives and cowwives? A range of applied pieties, against pan proteins for storybook farmers for the beauty of the earth against a token virus. Every coffee ground to a worm in need. For the crystals and against the slice of Candelaria. Every eggshell for the soil, and carton away from turtles. There is no story to values {no sparkle in this set of brackets}. If I made a shoe to hold them together it would be coconut suede, laces out of saffron threads. Spine, compass, gelatin, center —…
The Loss by Dorsía Smith Silva At first, it begins so simple. The pain itself is nothing, something you control, by default. You recognize the strange violence, as it drifts through the pelvis and lands in the vulva. Now the burning turns course, assailing the inner and outer chords of the legs. At the ledge, you purge yourself, giving back a two-inch parallel of flesh. Such a tiny figure, having no name to speak of, camouflaging the repeated starving of all of your longing. You understand, it will never be the same again. Like a drawn-out broken signature, the…
The Stepdaughters Are the Wicked Ones by Alexis Quinlan Scalding sand kicked to cool, cruel clouds roll past, white on light and happy giddy girls, volleyball reddening wrists. Spike it, one cries. To the side, new wife learning blood again, its fairytale tides. Welcome, hectic heart, to the bottom beneath the bottom, dark and icy trench whose creatures need no eyes to see the dream of a mother who would other and wive forever and ever a man. Game on a beach. Whose serve. Alexis Quinlan is a writer and teacher living in New York City. Her most recent…
The Anxious Child’s Alphabet Kendra Keefer-McGee “The Anxious Child’s Alphabet” consists of twenty-six mixed media works on cradled wood panels. Together the Alphabet explores the existential anxieties of a child who experiences the world differently. “The Anxious Child’s Alphabet” came out of the tension between my children’s need for mothering and safety and my own need to create. My oldest son had ‘existential angst’ beginning at age 3. He worried constantly– about war, viruses, injustice, mortality, and religion. The Anxious Child construct was originally based on him, but came to represent the experience of contemporary life. As any mother…