A folio curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Motherhood poems have a certain reputation of being overly sentimental and happy. Traditionally, they have not reflected the fact that the motherhood experience is highly complex, involving identity, body image, autonomy, and more. Jennifer Militello’s excellent article, “From the Maternal to the Mechanical” (APR May/June 2017), explores the “struggle against sentiment in contemporary American motherhood poetry.” The premise is that “America’s contemporary poets are now in a position where they must explore ways of writing about motherhood that can defy sentimentality and resist the cultural pressure to present motherhood mainly…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Arrival: An Interview of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s Arrival is a much-anticipated poetry collection by the Trinidadian-born writer. Here, Cheryl is interviewed by Keisha-Gaye Anderson at the Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, on June 14, 2017. Arrival is a love story between a mother and her daughter. The poems are road maps connecting one generation to another. The narrative begins in 1950 with a woman who is pregnant with twins. In her seventh month she delivers a stillborn boy, and a baby girl weighing less than two pounds. During this tumultuous period the father leaves…
Cheryl Boyce Taylor reads poems from her new book, Arrival, at the Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn on June 14, 2017. Thanks to Five Myles Gallery and Donna Lee Weber for the video footage. Arrival is a love story between a mother and her daughter. The poems are road maps connecting one generation to another. The narrative begins in 1950 with a woman who is pregnant with twins. In her seventh month she delivers a still-born boy, and a baby girl weighing less than two pounds. During this tumultuous period the father leaves the family and has an affair.…
Review by Anton Nimblett What She Name? If your life were a poem, what form would it take? Which of us could claim the delicate and even couplet? Who the villanelle and who the quadrille? Would your life be a sonnet pretending order, only to turn shockingly on itself? Surely some lives insist on the brash swagger of spoken word. Arrival, Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, presented in five sections, is very much an unveiling of her life. Boyce-Taylor’s intentionality in crafting the collection as memoir is evident. Her presentation of a rich life, fully-lived is well-served…
Mother Bunting – Sarah Dixon and Contributing Artists Bunting, that repeating triangle flag of cheeriness that decorates birthday parties and festivities, is now in the hands of feminist artists. Sarah Dixon, an artist based in Stroud, England, offers her Mother Bunting template for women to share their experiences of motherhood. Her original template, included here, opens up the boundaries of motherhood for everyone to tell “what is actually going on.” Maybe you screamed at your children this morning, or your body feels trashed. Maybe you lost your child, or are plagued by doubt, lack of sleep, or despair. There…
Sarah Dixon, born in London and raised in Cyprus and the Middle East, is a socially-engaged conceptual artist using a wide range of platforms and media. Her work explores participatory art making and ideas around how the ‘human social organism’ works and can be altered through communication and collaboration, both online and IRL. She draws on a very wide range of experience: she has a degree in Biology from UCL, worked as a ethnobotanist in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and has studied art forms from Orthodox icon painting to bronze casting and corporate design. Her work, has been shown at the…
Maggie Smith Overheard Nothing is yours. All of this, everything, is ours. When my daughter, age seven, says this to her little brother, I stop sliding the white plates into the kitchen cabinet and peek into the playroom. So much of what she says has the tone of prophecy, as if part of her lives in the future, as if she’s traveled up ahead, out of sight, but has stopped and turned, hearing me call. I call them my children, but nothing is mine. They are part of the shared all and everything she speaks of. Every night I check…
Kelli Russell Agodon Post-Partum Depression in Volvo For weeks, depression wrote her letters. Now darkness is so close, she feels its tongue in her mouth. In the slow motion of impact, car hitting tree, she imagines Plath, how that was one way and this, another. She wonders if she’s connected to poets, not by blood, but gloom. Where is her child? And in which room? A doctor in a blue mask looms: You made it. You’re all right. She realizes every note she’s written has been overlooked and looked over. Strangers walk to the window and tap on the glass—…
Karen Skolfield Raven Versus Crow “If a raven got in a fight with a crow, who would win?” my son asks. “Why would a raven fight a crow?” I ask. “It’s a strawberry,” my son says. “They’re fighting over fruit.” “It’s hard to imagine a fight over a strawberry,” I say. “Animals fight over food,” my son says. “Yes,” I say, “but a strawberry? It wouldn’t be a very serious fight.” “Oh, it’s serious,” my son says. “To the death.” “I don’t think ravens and crows fight to the death,” I say. “Can’t they just go find other strawberries?…