It starts with a whisper. An image. A single word. An idea so subtle that if you don’t sit still, it will evaporate by the time you blink. That is poetry. More than any other genre of writing, I feel that poetry is able to weave the gossamer threads of our collective consciousness into a blanket or a gong, a bolt of lightening or a warm kiss. But you have to become skillful enough to convey these images to readers with the same intensity that they appear in your mind. And like any other craft, this takes dedication and practice.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jennifer Jean Speculating Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding around the heath/ and the desolate fens. ~lines 103-4, Beowulf 1. Sometimes, Grendel is a fist— is 5 or so dicks digging into 1 proverbial palm in 1971. 2. Sometimes, they’re my father. The timing’s right. 3. Sometimes: I was in there—the box inside the gift box. Inside mom—my pummeled fetal skull & 5 dicks fighting for rights: sharding her, making her guilty for wanting smokes at dawn near the Venice Beach boardwalk in 1971. She refused her own words for years. 4. Sometimes:…
Megan Buchanan Diamonds Heat the House What you have is exactly what I’m always looking for, he said. How soon can you come by? Monday’s good, I said. And there go the Victorian diamonds worn twice in ten years. The magnifying glass says Russian. Undergrad graduation gift (thank you, Mom) – sold for a Smith College deposit, a little propane in a hollow tank. Long winter, little work. Worth it. Done. And there go the wedding rings – sweet crescent moon with tiny diamond stars sparkling on both sides, whether coming or going. And the other an enameled bluegreen…
Danielle Jones-Pruett Elegy in Search of a Speaker I would like to explain how the house on fire is different than the house she set on fire. It’s cavernous. My mind can’t find the edges, the walls. Soot and ash, but nothing solid. I obsess over the details of a doorknob: the tarnish of hundred year old brass, wreaths of engraved flowers burning into her palm when she pops it off, puts it in her pocket. It’s heavy, too heavy, for the worn fabric of her dress, but it keeps me from thinking of the knife, of how she…
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth “To question history is to watch the chaos of its particles / glisten into discernible patterns,” Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes in a poem called “Hybrid Algorithm” (83), and this is the central project of her deeply engaging second book, There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air. One epigraph for the book is James Baldwin’s acerbic comment, “What Americans mean by history is anything they think they can forget.” But Jamahl Dunkle’s work is to make us remember, through fact and imagination—to create our sense of a place that is at the center of American history…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Brenda Kelley Kim, a freelance writer and weekly columnist, writes with a down-to-earth style that makes you want to pour a cup of coffee and settle in for the afternoon. Her first book, Sink or Swim, is a series of short essays on managing the chaos of life as a woman and a mother. Each essay starts with an epigraph that serves as a jumping off point; then she expands on each subject in a truly delightful way. Her topics include cooking, shopping, friendships between women, stereotypes, dogs, travel, and work, among others. She writes…
Not for Mothers Only Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing Edited by Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff & with a foreward by Alicia Ostriker Not for Mothers Only collects poems on a range of subjects under the motherhood umbrella, some intimate and personal, others historical and political. ““The poets in this anthology have been ravished, whacked, illuminated, blown away by the experience of motherhood. The thousand experiences. The thousand interruptions. The fact that it is never what we expected, and that it is overwhelmingly intense. The intensity of the poems here bespeaks both the power of maternity in bending us…
Mom Egg Review is pleased to announce this year’s Pushcart Prize nominations: Poetry: Nadia Colburn, “The Physical World” Ann Fisher-Wirth, “In That Kitchen (She Speaks to Herself)” Owen Lewis, “Urgency” Essay: J.P. Howard, “Black Lives Matter: A Mama’s Perspective” All were published in MER Vol. 14 “Change” (2016). Congratulations and good luck to the nominees!
Review by Deborah Hauser The women in Seven Parts Woman, Marjorie Power’s second full length poetry collection, are mature; they are crones; they are changed; they knit, wear shawls, and sit in rockers as expected. What is delightfully unexpected is how Power engages the reader as these women face illness and loss and forge ahead to find comfort and peace in “a blue day, acacia in bloom, a yellow blaze” (82). The title poem, “Seven Parts Woman, One Part Art,” considers the relationship between the patient and her male surgeon. Composed in the third-person past tense, the form…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn Whenever I read Kim Addonizio, I feel a little jacked up, a little…dangerous. It’s as if I know she’s going to open a lid, not only on her world, her life, her family…but also on mine. Mortal Trash proves to be no exception. Addonizio is the mistress of metaphor. In “Manners,” a poem to tear out and refer to as a map to the strangeness that is modern life, her narrator hands down advice that narrows into a stark image: When the pulley of your childhood unwinds the laundry line of your dysfunction, here is a…