Bettering American Poetry 2015: An Anthology Eds Allen, Kim, King, Koo, Martinez, Ramirez, Sama, Villarreal & Wallschläger Reviewed by Carole Mertz The Bettering American Poetry 2015 project grew out of discontent. A group of editors were disgruntled by the fact that an author, Michael Derrick Hudson, received publication at a site by resubmitting a previously rejected work to the same venue, this time using an Asian-sounding nom de plume. His poem was published in The Best American Poetry 2015 without a word of explanation about the origin of the selection. The above-mentioned enraged editors were tired of the control…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Janet McCann Sarah Dickenson Snyder is a mother and English teacher as well as a poet who has published in a wide variety of journals and won several awards. Her chapbook Notes from a Nomad is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. The Human Contract is her first full-length collection, and it is a true pleasure to read. This book looks at mothering and daughtering over generations and examines a woman’s life in these roles. Much of its delight lies in the sustained sensibility of the speaker, who is consistent in how she observes and interprets the world…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Diane Stiglich, a writer and painter in Hoboken, New Jersey, captivates readers with her debut novel. A quick read at 134 pages, it is officially three interconnected stories, but they flow into each other so seamlessly that it feels like one continuous tale. A dreamlike work of magical realism, Have You Seen CindySleigh? takes us down many unexpected paths, filled with randomly appearing bottles of champagne, iPods, and a truck named Karen. We encounter a priest, gods, demons, and shape-shifting animals. In what feels like a dream within a dream, The Author herself appears to…
Review by Anne Britting Oleson Donald Rumsfeld famously said that we don’t know what we don’t know. In her literary memoir run scream unbury save, Katherine McCord makes this very clear, and this engenders a certain anxiety in her audience. The book is constructed as a series of prose poems, sometimes with innocuous titles like “SHELVES” or “CAMPING”; sometimes one of those titles is drawn from the content of the piece on the preceding page. Sometimes, though, not: as in “ADDENDUM/APOLOGIA/ERRAT(A OR UM) AND ADJUNCT/ADJUNCT PROFESSOR (LATER THAT (THE PREVIOUSLY NOTED) DAY). What is going on here? Or, to…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg In World Enough and Time, Mary Makofske finds inspiration in the persistent observation of human engagement. Whether in an overheard conversation or the witnessed pantomime of curious children, we learn to fill life’s cautionary path with ritual and self-declaration. The poem of the title that is a line in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” begins with an overheard come-on at a fraternity party, an intimate and unlikely recital of verse that despairs for the fleeting pleasures of beauty, youth, desire, and love. The impact of the 17th century work in its own time is…
WTAW Press is open for submissions of full-length prose manuscripts through September 15. We welcome submissions from writers unpublished, extensively published, and in between. We don’t privilege one aesthetic over another: we want to publish books that show us more things on heaven and earth than we have dreamt of. We are definitely mom-friendly! Guidelines on the website, https://www.wtawpress.org/
Review by Grace Gardiner Even before opening the lush and deceptively textured cover of Ann Cefola’s Free Ferry, the reader is alerted to the collection’s investigation of and rumination on instability vs. stability, ephemerality vs. longevity. The smooth, matte cover depicts summer-clothed children in play against an abstract sylvan background; patches of various greens and browns blot together, suggest the fecundity of a healthy and vibrant natural world. Yet ominous, almost seething splotches of white quickly interrupt this natural palette as the eye is drawn up the cover. In this imagery’s juxtaposition arises an unnerving set of questions:…
Review by Barbara Lawhorn Sarah W. Bartlett’s Slow Blooming Gratitudes opens with “Milkweed”, a poem that serves as a welcome, an invitation, and a directive about the joyful service of her written work: I want my words to spread beauty and use, healing surprise to calm your breath, your fevered stress, to purify what circles within that feeling and thought might open you to beauty and nurture against bitterness that would divide; like milkweed, weave a silken cord connecting head and heart-yours, mine and ours. (1) Bartlett is committed to rendering the world; that which is glorious…
Review by Linda Lerner In the poem “The Palace,” a child who was never conceived is trapped in a palace destroyed “in seconds” (6)–a repetitive phrase used in the poem–but “still left standing” and she becomes the central metaphor of this collection. This child “caught in between the bricks” (6)is the same one “who drew flowers and animals everywhere” until in Kindergarten “her imagination learned to stay within the lines;” (3)and it is the same child, who “like a dandelion” is playing freely outside her mother’s door—slamming disapproval when the game ends with rain beating down on her.(3)…
Reviewed by Marcela Fuentes What She Was Saying, a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Award, delves into memory and desire, loss and longing, and the unexpected pathos of the commonplace. In these finely-wrought stories, Marjorie Maddox reveals the complex space between the spoken and the glimpsed unspoken in the lives of women. In “Crowned,” the opening piece, a traveling preacher and his daughter arrive in a new town. The voice is perfectly teen-savvy: she knows she’ll be the festival queen, knows the moves she and her father will make, how the townspeople will react. Yet, beneath the surface of…