Mother Meets World in The Tornado is the World Review by Jennifer Key Catherine Pierce’s newest book The Tornado is the World (Saturnalia Books, 2016) follows her two previous collections The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012) and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. In The Tornado is the World (Saturnalia Books, 2016), Pierce, a Mississippi poet originally from Delaware, tackles that big slice of America known as tornado alley as her speaker reckons with the world, by turns chaotic, treacherous, and blessed, through a poetic sequence that loosely follows the events of a storm that touches…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Judy Swann These stories are disturbing. They sizzle like hydrogen peroxide on an open wound. They unpack “Other” to a depth never explored before in the American short story (“Others,” as in what Ashis Nandy says, “What others can do to you, you can do to your own.”[1]) In Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s White Dancing Elephants, a psychiatric patient destroys her doctor, a father considers murdering his disabled daughter, a taxi-driver-turned-poet disappoints his family, and a manicurist embezzles her criminal employer’s money. And that’s not the half of it. Bhuvaneswar pits Indian-American against Korean-American, African against African-American, African-American against…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Lara Lillibridge is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction. In 2016, she won the Slippery Elm Literary Journals’ Prose Contest and the American Literary Review’s Creative Nonfiction Contest. She was a finalist in both the Black Warrior Review’s Nonfiction contest and the Disquiet’s Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Lillibridge’s memoir, Girlish, is a conjuring of a childhood spent with two sets of parents in two very different locations. The narrative primarily unfolds in the third person with a second person and a first person accounting interspersed. Written in…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In her new book, What Does Not Return, Tami Haaland’s poetry informs the reader that we are all intimately and inextricably tied to the natural world. The recognition of this interdependence is tightly woven throughout the book. Nature can impart many things and these poems ask us to pay attention to messages at once transcendent and temporal, visceral and ethereal. Haaland leads us through an array of vistas including oceans, mountains, high deserts and prairies. In the first section titled “Forgetting,” these disparate landscapes come alive and serve as backdrops to a mother’s dementia:…
Review by Ros Howell A recent reviewer of Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty writing in The Guardian online (herself a mother) appeared to reject to one of the central arguments in Rose’s book that “Unless we recognise what we are asking mothers to perform in the world – and for the world- we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces” (2). That reviewer, Tessa Hadley, asked “Does anyone ‘outside of advertising executives’ really idealize motherhood to the detriment of us all? Aren’t mothers as much architects of the divide and conquer…
Review by Janet McCann This collection is a spooky delight that combines poetic prose pieces with flowing, evocative drawings to give an impression of those who participated in the Salem Witch Trials—not only as they were at the eighteenth century event, but as a parallel to the people and forces of our own time. Each section takes up a different participant, hunters and hunted, and gives a look into a soul. The interior monologues illustrate the conflicts that arise from flawed human nature and its greatly flawed institutions. Linda Lerner is a well-known New York City poet who has more…
M.A.M.A. (Mothers Are Making Art) is a collaboration among ProCreate Project, The Museum of Motherhood, and Mom Egg Review. Marketa Senkyrik- Art mother’s diary (for Kaya) 2017-2018 hand-bound diary / drawings – fine-liner, watercolour crayons, crayons My mum has plenty of photo albums – one from each holiday, one from each Christmas… When I am visiting my parents, we often look at the photos together. I like to draw diaries. They are a bit like photo albums – they bring back memories. This is a very special one. It’s for Kaya. To remind her how it was when she was…
Review by Grace Gardiner It might be expected to begin a review of Lesléa Newman’s newest poetry collection Lovely by saying that the poems that comprise this collection are themselves lovely, but this collection seems a poignant, playful, and earnest place to explore the tender truism Charles Simic once wrote in an inscription to Mark Strand, that “the dream of every honest cliché is to enter a great poem.” Indeed, poem after great poem, Newman, author of over 70 books of poetry, prose, and children’s literature, realizes in Lovely this dream of many honest clichés. The biggest and brightest…
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The Way We Worked, In Three Acts by Jamie Wagman I. Long Ago My grandmother worked in kitchens, professional and home, pouring coffee and working a register, working from recipes and working from memory. Her hands were smooth velvet, her eyes deep brown and expressive. She whistled while she worked, driving her butcher husband and two grown children mad. I loved the sound; I was her taste tester, her fan club president, her rapt audience. How had she mothered? I imagine crossly, sometimes with rules and sometimes with rewards. If she gave her dog an ice cream cone for…