Review by Ellen Meeropol When the reader first meets Mia, she is trying to find her bra. “I live in my car,” she tells us, “and I only have one bra. It has to be around here somewhere. I don’t like to sleep with the bra on. It’s a little scratchy. For those of you who have never worn a bra, let me be honest, you aren’t missing much” (1). Mia’s voice captivated me from her first words. A homeless young woman living in Los Angeles, we meet her in February 2020, just as the pandemic is about to…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carole Mertz Rollender Ties Her Faith Concepts to Her Poetic Vision Nicole Rollender’s emotional and richly endowed poems touch the heart. Very personal, they cover themes of maternal love, dreams and dreaming, religiosity, sobriety, marital fidelity, and angst; and they arrive in mostly weighted tones. The collection’s title alludes to the ephemeral, yet the poet’s pleasantly assonant lines linger, many assembled with vivid imagery. These poems are generally accessible. They present as free verse and some contain ethereal or surrealistic elements. Some remain enigmas, (see “If I Could Have Been Born the Lord’s Dog”). But even…
Review by Nicole Callihan “Can you see why I mother every possible thing?” Kai Coggin asks in Mother of Other Kingdoms. Here, in “Tender and Ache,” the poet has scooped a bumble bee from the windowpane, cupped his slow body, and carried it to a lilac tree. “If you die, at least die happy inside here,” the poet says to the bee. But the bee does not die—not yet anyway—and several hours later Kai witnesses the bee buzzing by—“I’m alive!—” and tells us: “This is how I mother. I rock the smallest species to sleep,/ lullaby our deepest human…
Review by Laura Dennis I know Syracuse, or at least I thought I did. My mother’s family lives just north of that city in the heart of New York’s snowbelt, homeland of the Onondaga. All that changed when I entered the world of Mary McLaughlin Slechta’s Mulberry Street Stories. In this 25-piece story cycle, a cast of recurring characters moves between past and present, between this world and an adjacent one not visible to all. The vast majority of the stories, many short enough to qualify as flash, are narrated in the third person, with three told in first…
Review by Melanie McGehee Mulberry Street Stories by Mary Slechta won the 2021 Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, an award that celebrates the best in contemporary fiction by writers of the African Diaspora. These twenty-five interwoven stories told in 190 short pages will surprise, delight, and sometimes confuse. Slechta proves herself a masterful storyteller as she conjures a neighborhood of characters that move in and out from each story selection, idling between past and present and, perhaps, future timelines. Mulberry Street is fantastical – in parts. We begin with a fairy or folk tale of sorts. A young girl Dessa…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg So much is summoned in the diminutive but sleek and dark edition of Ex Machina, or perhaps “unleashed” is a better word. The poems in this collection by Joan Naviyuk Kane pulse with language that captures varying energy– floats with incantation-like recitations on the landscape, unfurls in the fragile indignities of womanhood, and hammers at the dilemma of detachment from one’s ancestral legacy. Kane’s narrative versatility can recall Silko or Eliot, and each mesmerizes with its own sense of urgency or cautionary tale, whether within the larger concerns of identity and empowerment, and exist as…
María DeGuzmán is a scholar, photographer, writer, and music composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Apricity, Phoebe, The Banyan Review, Oyster River Pages, Oxford Magazine, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Roanoke Review, 45th Parallel, Inverted Syntax, Mandorla, Huizache, and La Piccioletta Barca.
MER Online Quarterly March, 2024 Welcome to MER Quarterly! This issue explores connection and change, in poetry, art, memoir, and more. Image: “Caught Between Worlds” by María DeGuzmán THE WAY WE WERE: Motherhood as a Catalyst for Change A new poetry folio curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach, features poems that explore the ways motherhood changes us, including relationships, self-image, identity, health. Featured Poets: Erin Armstrong Rachel Becker Rebecca Brock Caridad Moro-Gronlier Natasha Herring Elizabeth Hutchinson Amy Lee Marjorie Maddox Rachel Neve-Midbar Sunayna Pal Laura Read GIRLFRIENDS 2 A new…
THE WAY WE WERE: Motherhood as a Catalyst for Change In her poem, “Learning Language,” Erin Armstrong writes, “Extinguished are the mornings where I rise / alone to my writing, my coffee, my sense of self. . .” The poems in the March MER Folio, “The Way We Were,” explore how motherhood forever changes us: our bodies, our worries, and how we navigate this world. The poems examine these changes with honesty; they are physical and feel the changes in their bones. In many ways, we could have called this folio “That Was Then, This Is Now.” The poems…
Laura Read Winged Victory When I walked up the stairs in the Louvre towards The Winged Victory, I cried as I told my son the story of when I brought my mom to see her and she wept and told me she never thought she’d get here, and he said, Say something cool I can tell my children some day, and I said, I miss my mother at 46. You are supposed to view The Winged Victory from the side to understand the full force of her body leaning into the wind on her imaginary ship, but I always see…