JENNIFER FRANKLIN PHILOMELA AT THE LOOM He thought when he took my tongue, he could keep me from telling but my fingers speak for me now. I sleep by day while the arrogant sun cuts the window as his knife cut me. Nightly, I cannot consider sleep. My fingers fly over thread, banishing the pain that slices my mouth—relentless blade. His face looms as I weave. In these brutal scenes, I discover something better than beauty. I never expected to survive so when I transformed agony into a tapestry shaming afternoon light, tulips and bedclothes opened to take me.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Susan Copich Frustrations, Contradictions and Storm: The Domestic Bliss series Note by Ana Silva With shocking bravery, nuanced humor, and a plentitude of crafted detail, Susan Copich’s Domestic Bliss self-portraits tackle the breadth and depth of Woman, and “all who are in touch with their feminine” as Copich puts it. Each portrait drips with liquid color and engages at both the narrative and lyrical registers. Pass your eyes around the corners of each print to uncover a fuller story— the noose that counters the perfect bursts of blush on the smiling mother’s face in Happy Days — the lurking plugged-in hair dryer in Bath Time. Also, let your eye stay in the…
#MeToo a Vox folio Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featured Poets Jennifer Franklin Jessica Goodfellow Idrissa Simmonds Lesléa Newman Rebecca Hart Olander Zeina Hashem Beck Eileen Cleary Everyday, we are witnessing women speaking out, giving their trauma words. Ten years ago, Tarana Burke urged us to “tell your story, if you’re compelled to tell it.” The #MeToo movement was born out of her need to create a place of empathy for women who have been victims of sexual violence. This was the space safe enough for Burke’s own daughter to tell her story. But it’s an…
A Mother’s Love: Essays and Poems Exploring Grief and Loss a folio curated by JP Howard featuring Regina Jamison Breena Clarke Cheryl Boyce-Taylor Sonia Jaffe Robbins Amber Flame Lynne Connor I am writing this introductory essay to this folio exploring a mother’s love on the two year anniversary of my own mother’s passing. Two years into this great loss, I am still remembering, gathering, celebrating, mourning, and holding on to pieces of Mama. Some days she enters my poems and essays and when I turn the page, Mama is there guiding me. Other days I fear I will…
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 25th 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 December, 2017 Art by Anna Hughes words by Elise Gregory Art by Anna Hughes The Riddle (2017) This stop-motion animation, made from collaged monoprints The work focusses on the loss of self-identity in early motherhood. What is left of a person’s personality once…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Jacqueline Doyle’s work has earned her a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017 and has won the 2017 Flash Prose/Poetry Contest at Midway Journal. Doyle has had work published in Hotel Amerika, Quarter After Eight, PANK, Monkey Bicycle, The Gettysburg Review, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. The Missing Girl won the Black River Chapbook Competition. Doyle is a professor of English at California State University, Easy Bay, and resides with her husband and son in the San Francisco Bay area. The Missing Girl is comprised of eight separate stories, each only a…
Artist’s Statement Reflections on Salt Labyrinth with children, live art performed at the Lace Market Gallery as part of the GAL collective Performing Alchemy exhibition. The exercise of creating live art with children mirrored many arcs of my personal experiences of parenthood, in the daily and in the transformation of integrating new and sometimes conflicting identities into our understanding of our self. One of the most noticeable aspects was the permeability of the salt lines. As I began drawing the labyrinth, my children were playing a racing game, running over the area where I was drawing. The labyrinth quickly started…
Lines in the Woods by Ana C. H. Silva Artist’s Statement I chose the softest muslin I could find; one thick enough to withstand several washings and feel like one’s favorite pillowcase, apron, or handkerchief. What lasts? Bronze work, stone buildings, but also —as we find in every thrift and antique store— ceramic and cloth endure, too, far after the people who worked them. The ones who sewed and embroidered have generally been women, of all skin colors, times, and nationalities. I think my cloth poems in the woods were, in the end, an ode to these mostly forgotten and…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez The title drew me to Gloved Against Blood. I admired its cacophony, how my mouth untangled the phrase; I admired its assonance, how the sounds “uh, uh” became onomatopoetic, suggesting pain. It prompted me to peel back the glove, reveal the hand. Even before I opened Cindy Veach’s debut poetry collection, the title ushered me into its world of sound and making. Gloved Against Blood weaves generations of women bound by work, the physical labor of tending looms and the “close work” of stitching and sewing. Veach gives us a sense of the first generation by…
Review by Judith Skillman Carol Smallwood’s new collection, Prisms Particles, and Refractions, is at once playful and serious. Her work in this volume ranges from extremely concise poems such as “On Days of Slow Rain” where the speaker becomes “a child again / longing to read / darkened tree bark/like Braille” (53) to the four-page oeuvre written in journal form, “A Late Summer Diary.” The fact that these two poems are neighbors makes the transition between short and long more emphatic, and creates echoes and resonances. As Smallwood deftly moves through a variety of content and subject matter, the reader…