A GUARDIAN protects us, and turned around and inward, is what we must protect. Laura Von Rosk earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from SUNY at Purchase. Her paintings have been exhibited nationally in both solo and group shows. Her awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship; an Individual Artist Support Grant from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation; an artist Fellowship Grant from the Bernheim Foundation in Clermont, KY; and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Centrum, WA; Dorland Arts Colony, CA; NY…
Author: Mom Egg Review
A GUARDIAN represents someone who protects and supports what is of value and needs love. Rosary Solimanto is best known for her interdisciplinary activist based work which explores the objectification she faces battling multiple sclerosis. She encourages discourse on disability identity to unfold to empower the disabled. Solimanto is an emerging artist who has exhibited in New York City, New Jersey, North Carolina, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Hudson Valley, Connecticut, Toronto and Spain. She has performed in the O + Festival in Kingston, NY, The International Human Rights Art Festival In New York…
GUARDIAN: What is your superpower? For the first time, Wonder Woman and other superheroes beat out princess costumes on Halloween. Fearless Girl down on Wall St., though controversial for the right reasons, is a hot selfie at the moment. “Nevertheless, she persisted” is a popular tattoo choice right now. Some Hidden Figures are making their way to light. Women warriors and female heroes are emblazoned on our t-shirts, waving in our protest banners, and held in our hearts. Whether they are ancient goddesses, national politicians, international activists, or our mothers, daughters, sisters or partners, we are delighting in their power.…
An Interview by J.P. Howard, MER VOX Editor-at-Large, of Mireya Perez-Bustillo and Patsie Alicia Ifill I’ve been thinking a lot about friendships between women, and in particular between women writers, and how we often sustain one another. Not only do we write together through these tumultuous political times, but we often lift each other up, hold one another accountable, are able to call each other out on our stuff, and lovingly remind our sistagurlfirends about upcoming writing deadlines. For those who are parents, we share a special bond, and no matter our child’s age, we look to our friends for…
The Mother Dispossessed Curator: Patricia Brody Featured Poets Srividya Kannan Ramachandran Elisabeth Frischauf Esther Cohen Ellen C. Goldberg Lisa J Cihlar Jane Schulman Katrina Kostro Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins Alexandria Mitchell From the Curator: THESE VOICES Whenever I see the logo letters MER, first I think, Ah –Mermaid! then Mom Egg Review, and somehow these body-sea images of women’s magic beckon me to enter their depths. The poems and paintings you’re about to encounter, (hopefully you’ll stop and paddle around to see and experience from different angles) – are etched, colored, written by women in Seeking Your Voice: A Poetry and Memoir Workshop…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn It is hard not to feel something of the voyeur when interacting with the short-run chapbook Folie à Quatre. Its high gloss cover offers up a sepia-tint woman in a sheer chemise who appears disinterested or unfazed by her audience, in communion, perhaps, with her own naked body and thoughts. Beyond the cover, a sheet of tissue acts as a soft lens through which we discern the chapbook’s title page, heightening this sense of being privy to things conventionally cloaked, obscured, made secret. Past the title page, we encounter four sections of poetry by four female…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Les Fauves, Barbara Crooker gracefully achieves the daunting task of creating ekphrastic poetry that transcends the purely visual. Compact explorations of meditative beauty, the poems highlight Crooker’s remarkable craftsmanship and skill. She is adept at coaxing the reader to the center of her poems where they sizzle and pop, blooming open like an Asian flowering tea. Acutely aware of using all five senses in poetry writing, Crooker infuses her poems with scent, sound, color, taste, and texture until they become epitomes of new language: “Dark violet chocolate // with a greenish flesh, blood-red pulp,…
Review by Grace Gardiner The title of Judy Kronenfeld’s fourth full-length collection Bird Flying through the Banquet alludes to a metaphor for existence posed by the 8th century English monk Saint Bede the Venerable in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In this seminal text on English religious history and identity, Bede describes “[t]he present life of man upon earth” as brief, rich, and mysteriously bounded as the flight of a sparrow through a warm and lively banquet, the bird first escaping, then (un)willingly returning to the cold winter night and its storms. Kronenfeld, who is Lecturer Emerita at the…
Janet Garber’s comic debut novel, Dream Job, Wacky Adventures of an HR Manager, has been named a Runner-Up in the 2016 Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book contest and a Finalist in the 2017 New Generation Indie Book Awards, making the author very happy indeed. She has also been interviewed on a UK radio broadcast here. Janet’s website is www.janetgarber.com.
Review by Jennifer Martelli Field Guide to Autobiography is a mingling of sound, disintegration, and copulation, using the gorgeous Latinate language of insects and oceanic creatures, to reach this tragic and “absolute brightness” of life. The very title of the book hints at scientific nomenclature with a brilliant female voice. Melissa Eleftherion blurs the expectations and parameters of a book of poetry, also. The poems surprise with their flouting of poetic rules, as if the speaker is responding to an inner law, one that is generative, holy: To become solemnly visible, gratification of the body A curving, a fabric, tidal…