Review by Lara Lillibridge “I’m a separated, co-parenting mom, a writer and an academic, who tends to struggle between two internal voices…” (8) Carley Moore’s essay collection, 16 Pills, is an exploration on what it means to be a single parent, a disabled child, a daughter, a teacher, a sister, a woman. The nonlinear essays vacillate between distant and near past: childhood, parenting, dating. She writes about diva cups, OKCupid, books, movies, art, Trump and the Pulse Nightclub shooting. Moore explores writing as a mother and the culture of shame that surrounds it: “It’s hard for women to tell the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Margie Shaheed I met Margie Shaheed when I was teaching English literature at Rutgers-Newark in the early 1990s. Margie was returning to college as an adult student; in fact, we were close in age. She rocked my class with her inquisitive mind and passion for words. After she left Rutgers we stayed in touch and I watched her bloom as a community poet, deeply committed to writing about and sharing poetry with underserved communities. Her book Tongue Shakers, based on first-person interviews she conducted with immigrants, was born from several poems she published in the MER special issue on Mother…
Reviewed by Janet McCann Do you like poems about America’s past that evoke a Rockwellesque landscape, then curl up and scratch the back of your neck? I do. But if that’s what you are looking for, this collection isn’t it. Rather, it will grab you by the hair and pull you into a dark place in our history, and hold you hostage there. This is the most powerful representation of the Kitty Genovese murder that I have seen, and I have seen quite a few. I was a new college graduate when the murder happened, and could not believe that…
Review by Katrinka Moore In Efflorescence, Dawn Marar navigates borders — between America and the Middle East, between family and political life, between art and nature — and even crosses a border of language, inserting Arabic words among the English lines. She is an adventurous writer — both playful and complex — who views the world through the lens of conscience. These elements blend together to create a moving, cohesive poetry collection full of intelligence and attention to detail. Marar is adept at creating compelling juxtapositions. The opening poem, “Sparkles,” describes the parallels between the American-born speaker and…
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The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 33rd edition of this collaboration in which 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 Art by Charlotte Morrison Morrison shows nine images which combined become a chronological visual story of her developing art practice – from conception…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Before I opened Monica A. Hand’s DiVida to review it, I felt a particular responsibility; Alice James Books published this collection posthumously. Poets work hard to promote their work, and in this regard, DiVida seemed an orphan in need. Reading it deepened my commitment but for a different reason; these poems stunned me to the core. DiVida needs to be read, celebrated, and sung from the rooftops. It’s not accidental that Whitman’s words bubbled up in my first attempt to describe this amazing book. While there’s nothing barbaric or yawpish about DiVida, Hand’s work is…
Review by Judy Swann With its polyvalent title, Paige Riehl’s Suspension is the perfect hierophant for an exploration of the bridges between the self and the world. Many of the poems are about an international adoption, itself an image of nesting/nestling a poet-mother’s experiences into the loving act of parenting. The threads hang together, suspended like an oriole’s nest in which the children thrive. Then there’s the chemical sense of “suspension,” where undissolved particles of one thing are dispersed throughout another—truly the farrago of my life…yours too? And let’s not forget “suspension” as a stoppage or temporary withholding—not just as…
Review by Meghan O’Neill Jendi Reiter’s debut short story collection, An Incomplete List of My Wishes, is a model of tension. The push and pull of one’s own sexuality, family relationships or friends and enemies, but most poignantly the tension between what is said and not said. “Taking advantage of what she now knew to be her invisibility, her inconsequential being, Carla wove among the clusters of cocktail drinkers…” (88). The characters in each of Reiter’s stories are united in their own perceived inconsequence. It is the reader who draws the through-line, who sees the need or misunderstandings in each,…
MER VOX Quarterly – Fall 2018 Tina Barry – The Virginia Project The Virginia Project is a collaboration between poet Tina Barry and several visual artists. In 2014, when Tina Barry moved from Brooklyn to High Falls, she learned that the artist Marc Chagall and his partner Virginia Haggard had made a similar move to the town in 1946. After some research, Barry started writing prose poems in the voices of [Chagall’s lover Virginia] Haggard, and her five-year-old daughter Jean McNeil. Visual artists show work in response to the poems. ARTISTS Lori van Houten – White Flannel Amy Talluto – High Falls Giselle Potter – Circus Heige Kim –…