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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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 We welcome submissions from writers unpublished, extensively published, and in between.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…
Reviewed by Libby Maxey At seventy pages, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow is too long to be a chapbook, but it has that feel: focused, intimate, slight yet substantial. Peg Alford Pursell’s stories tend toward poetic microfiction; most of them could fit on a single page, although this edition gives them ample breathing room. And they do breathe, swelling and contracting through each living, human moment. “The breath is the breath is the breath” (3), as we’re told at the end of the first story (“Day of the Dead”), and that sounds like an invitation to…
Reviewed by Julia Lisella Odd Mercy is aptly named. Alzheimer’s, explored in a crown of twelve unrhymed but solidly structured sonnets called “The Little Mommy Sonnets,” allows for odd and unexpected mercies— Some people study for years at the feet of a master to learn how to live in the moment. Your sharp tongue dissolves to a soft fog, my armor melts, the clear moment before us like a plowed field. (3) The sonnets make up the first half of this slim volume of poems by Gail Thomas. In them, some of the symptoms of…
Reviewed by Judy Swann When my friend tells me this loss will open the way to all the others in my life I think of the way I am drawn (86) So says Wisconsin poet Andrea Potos in “Every Body She Carries,” one of the eighty-eight poems in Diane Lockward’s uncanny anthology The Doll Collection. How do we become who we are, how are we drawn? For little girls, dolls have been an integral part of becoming. My grandmother used to call me her “Dresden doll,” after all, and sometimes I still am. Much of…
Reviewed by Sarah W. Bartlett Poet Laura Foley is not new to publication having won a couple of poetry contests and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of six collections of poetry, all of which have received rave reviews. Into the bargain, she has a unique photographer’s eye trained to unusual perspective and subject matter. You really need to visit her website to see what I mean. Her perceptive eye and heart, perhaps enhanced by her Buddhist training and work as a prison and palliative care volunteer, make themselves known in her…