Review by Mindy Kronenberg The structure of We are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds creates an odd and interesting experience for the reader—we encounter chapter and verse of a life of emotional stops and starts, domestic rituals and rites of passage, while a continued narrative whispers along the bottom of the page to the end of the book. It is almost as if Sarah Sadie is poet and docent/chorus, living and reimagining the mythic and intimate moments of her life. Her work plays with our sense of time, and the words we use to express love, regret, domestic…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Issa M. Lewis In the early chapters of Other Than Mother: Choosing Childlessness with Life in Mind, Kamalamani cites a researcher who claims, “Intentionally childless women have been reported as ‘deviant’” (42). This is the crux of her argument: that those women who have not given birth—either by choice, circumstance, or a combination of the two—are subject to raised eyebrows, intrusive questions, and judgment by what she calls a “pronatal” society. To give birth to and rear children is the default; to do otherwise, for any reason, is to assume a role of countercultural defiance. However, as…
Review by Carol Dorf When I had a “missed abortion” after two years of fertility treatments, a colleague (who was a daughter of the chief rabbi of Morocco, so given authority on these matters) told me she had a dream where I was sitting on a hill, playing with a daughter. For many of us, particularly those who have suffered from infertility, the dream-child precedes an actual child. In The Baby Book, Robin Silbergleid, shares her journey as an intentional single mother. She begins her journey at an age when many assume pregnancy is easy—27—but that doesn’t turn out to…
We sit in the kitchen my grandmother, my mother, me listening to the susurration of water boiling on the stove. Once the bottle is sterile, a careful spoon of powdered formula— my nephew needs to be fed every hour filling the tiny pocket of his stomach. Then the crying and flailing till he spits most of it up. He is a half-hatched chick in my arms— his lashless eyes holding mine, mouth opening and waiting, the bumps of his shoulders shadows of wings unformed when he flew untimely from the womb. My grandmother, sunk heavy in her seat, says: “You…
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11:4 Shoshana Sarah is a multidisciplinary artist, American-born, based in Jerusalem. Creator of Poets of Babel, a multilingual poetry club, she explores hybrid and multi-local identity through poetry/spoken word, lyric essay, and performance. She belly dances, teaches writing, and has completed The Shaindy Rudoff Creative Writing Graduate Program. She is obsessed with maps, clocks, compasses, lampposts, and the…
A Conversation With Lore Segal – Acclaimed writer Lore Segal and children’s book author Laura Geringer Bass discuss Lore’s novels, children’s books, and translations, her life as a writer and mother, her writing practice, and upcoming projects. With Marjorie Tesser for Mom Egg Review. Part 1 Lore Segal speaks about childhood experiences and becoming a writer, discovering her subject matter, The Juniper Tree, Gallows Songs, Her First American. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCrItU26Wv0 Part 2 Lore Segal reads “The Goblins” from The Juniper Tree, and “The Virus” from Gallows Songs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkyDED6NsbE Part 3 Lore Segal discusses writing and mothering, Her First American, Lucinella,…
Sunday, September 18 at 4 PM – 6 PM Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop 141 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY fabric (n.) late 15c., “building; thing made; a structure of any kind,” from Middle French fabrique (14c.), verbal noun from fabriquer (13c.), from Latin fabricare “to make, construct, fashion, build,” from fabrica “workshop,” also “an art, trade; a skillful production, structure, fabric,” from faber “artisan who works in hard materials,” from Proto-Italic *fafro-, from PIE *dhabh- “to fit together” (source also of Armenian darbin “smith;” also see daft). The noun fabrica suggests the earlier existence of a feminine…
Reviewed by Lara Lillibridge – On Mothering Multiples: Complexities and Possibilities is an anthology comprised of fifteen essays by mothers of multiples. The collection includes a mix of personal essays and well-researched academic papers with three “interludes” by visual artists. The anthology is bookended by opening and closing chapters by the editor, Kathy Mantas. As mother of two singletons, I read On Mothering Multiples not in appreciation of a common experience, but to better understand the lives of women who birth multiple children at concurrent ages. I had often wondered how my friends who had twins coped with newborns,…
Review by Grace Gardiner – Abundance abounds throughout the ever-tight and crisp poems that comprise Night Ringing, a finalist for the Autumn House Poetry Prize and the fearless fifth collection of much-decorated and widely-published poet Laura Foley. Abundances of time and experience and place—from childhood to motherhood; marriage to divorce; long-worn illnesses to unexpected death; exciting, new love to a violent, spent love; and an inner-city apartment’s “window barred to passing feet” (19) to “the curve / where the woods / grow dark” (41)—course through Foley’s (often much less than) one-page poems and relaxed, straight-forward diction. These thematic and craft…
Review by Rosalind Howell – In Margo Orlando Littell’s first novel, Each Vagabond by Name (winner of the University of New Orleans’ Publishing Lab prize), a Pennsylvanian town stands as a microcosm for our response to the millions of immigrants, refugees, and displaced people on the move across the world. The mountains that border the town of Shelk provide unreliable protection from an influx of ‘gypsies’ whose casual thievery escalates in tandem with the town’s fear and rage. Shelk’s residents don’t know where the camp is, but they feel its presence as malevolent. The surrounding hillside harbors the gang…