Review by Hannah Cohen The Atari centipede, Paris, walkie-talkies, and poorly-drawn comics—Jessy Randall’s third collection Suicide Hotline Hold Music is as far-ranging in its topics and images of love, sex, and adulthood as it is humorous and wholly human. A unique aspect of this book is its inclusion of drawings; for the most part, these one-page comics provide an enjoyable, visual experience. A curator of special collections at Colorado College, Jessy Randall has published in Poetry, Rattle, Asimov’s, Mudfish, McSweeney’s and elsewhere; her first collection A Day in Boyland was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. A writer with…
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Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen To read Millicent Borges Accardi’s Only More So is to step into pools of lush, full waters only to be pulled under by currents almost unbearably swift. This is a “jump into frozen water” (75), which invariably requires a “ … cardinal leap of faith” (75). Accardi’s poetry has earned fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright, and the California Arts Council, among others. Only More So is first and foremost astoundingly brave poetry because it explores subjects such as oppression, violence, rape, ethnic cleansing, and breast cancer. Women, in particular and unequally, have had to bear…
Review by Christine Salvatore The Marine Corps ought not to permit marriage. A monastic order all the way. Married men make poor soldiers. If the government wanted you to have a wife, they’d issue you one. –Lt. Gen Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller This opening quote sets the tone for Lisa Stice’s first collection of poetry, Uniform, in which Stice contends that marriage to a Marine includes a third entity, the US Marine Corps. In fragmented language that could be right out of a treatise on warfare, we follow a young wife of a Marine Corps officer as she, much like…
Announcing new Mom Egg Review Online Editors Mom Egg Review is proud to welcome editors for several popular online features. Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach will edit our VOX MOM column, which publishes poetry, fiction, creative prose, craft discussions, and op/ed. pieces by individuals and curated groups. Ana C. H. Silva will be editing the Gallery section of featured artists, as well as a special section focusing on hybrid works. At the moment, featuring in these columns is by invitation, but submissions periods will be announced in the future. Contact for Vox Mom and Gallery Eds is [email protected]. They…
Praise for Bluewords Greening: Bluewords Greening is a book about motherhood—love and family and fear and failure and mini-ninjas. We observe a mother’s bewildering experiences with her son as the poems detail his diagnosis with a rare form of epilepsy and the “bluewords” that result from his aphasia. The speaker is in deep conversation with the son’s frustrated and often surprisingly beautiful lexicon; she’s also in conversation with the work of contemporary visual artists and the craft of printmaking and the twelfth-century visionary, St. Hildegard. Stewart-Nuñez’s music and skilled syntax and stubborn insistence on the beauty of the world—even…
News from the Mom Egg Review Community – Marge Piercy selected Rachel Hall’s Heirlooms for the G.S.Sharat Chandra Book Prize. BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City published the linked collection in September 2016. Heirlooms begins in France in 1940 and follows a French Jewish family through the war and to America. It examines love and duty and the long reach of history. Joan Leotta: My new book, Summer in a Bowl, is out! This book tells of Rosa’s introduction to gardening and enjoyment of fresh vegetables by her Aunt Mary. When Rosa expresses sadness that summer has come to…
Review by Marcene Gandolfo In many ancient myths, the wound simultaneously provides cause for suffering and source for transformation. The poems in Judith Skillman’s latest collection, House of Burnt Offerings, reflect this view. While a number allude to mythological or literary figures, most live in the present rituals of daily life. They center on childhood memories, marital struggles, encounters with illness and aging, and the disappointments that result from unfulfilled desires. Many focus on the various wounds, both psychic and physical, that transform life and provide insight. Skillman’s language creates metaphor—another means of transformation—and these metaphors resonate most strongly throughout…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn I was drained, depleted, tired of carrying loads of emotional laundry around. I wanted to sleep deeply. We were not doing well, our little Asperger’s family in its tiny house…we were all now in the steam cooker, and it seemed the pressure would blow off the roof. (136) Dr. Darold A Treffert, MD, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, said this of the 1988 movie “Rain Man”: “Few disabilities will ever experience the kind of massive public awareness in such an empathic, uniformly well received and popular format that Rain Man has…
An exercise on Psalm 119 I am truly blameless. Or happy. Or neither one. Deep at night, I sit in the shadow of my own verses the furrows I tread with my mouth sheltering saplings that might never grow into a real oak or a maple dripping with syrup… The furrows get sticky, holding my knees and ankles— I need to grow new soil, massage the crumbs with my fingers, a sapling of earth itself that will carry dark, heavy fruit, moist with questions, a different source of food for my busy tongue, treading the lines between time and dawn.…