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!
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Review by Janet McCann The title The Language of Little Girls instantly set loose an earworm for me, that being “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” But this refrain did not stay with me even through the first page of the book. The girls and women in this collection are not delicate sentimental creatures, but rather fascinating and sometimes alarming women steeped in the lore of the female, connecting up with nature in unexpected ways. Kate Falvey is on the editorial board of the N.Y.U. Bellevue Literary Review and is editor in chief of the 2 Bridges Review. She teaches at…
Review by Deborah Hauser Cathleen Calbert’s fourth book, The Afflicted Girls, which won the Vernice Quebodeaux “Pathways” Poetry Prize for Women, is part history (though not meant to be historically accurate), part tribute, and part social critique. The collection opens with “First Wife,” a dramatic dialogue in the voice of Lilith, and closes with “The Princess Bride,” a tribute to Calbert’s friend. In between, these pages give voice to an array of women from Florence Nightingale to Zelda Fitzgerald in a variety of styles. “Talking Cure” and other poems use found language. “At Chawton Cottage” and “′The Misses Bronte’s Establishment…
Review by Grace Gardiner At first glance, the premise of Katie Manning’s fourth collection, A Door with a Voice, a free digital chapbook available for download from Agape Editions’ Morning House series, seems simply and obviously rendered. Manning, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, prefaces the chapbook’s sixteen poems with an artist’s statement that outlines her process of composition whereby she “us[es] the last chapter from one book of the Bible as a word bank for each poem” (iii). Furthermore, the contents page pairs…
Review by Lorraine Currelley Jamaican culture is cast as a main character in Here Comes the Sun. Readers get to experience Jamaican culture through a socio-political and economic lens. Nicole Dennis- Benn has woven together a story that is complex and entertaining, one that exposes the socio-political, cultural and economic hardships and mechanics of a system rooted in colonialism and oppression; a story of Jamaican tourism vacationers do not get to see. The intersection of tourism and poverty. The exploitation of Jamaica’s impoverished. The feelings of disgust for tourists, kept buried in the bellies of Jamaica’s residents, invisible to tourists.…
Brainwalk by May Joseph On October 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy enveloped downtown Manhattan in a total blackout. The terrifying reality of living on the top floor of a tall skyscraper without electricity, a generator or emergency lights hit home. My husband fell down the stairs in the Sandy blackout and sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. A long coma, total memory loss, speech loss, cognitive dysfunction and paralysis followed. The journey to normality took over three years. Chapter 8 Brainfreeze What is crucial to this state of perpetual uncertainty is cultivating optimism, even humor. My eleven year old little…
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Review by Lara Lillibridge Susan Roney-O’Brien, a poet and teacher, won first place in the Worcester County Poetry Association contest, judged by Mary Oliver, and was voted Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English. Her chapbook, Farmwife, won the William & Kingman Page Poetry Book Award. Her work can be found in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Diner, Ekphrasis, Stillwater Review, Block Island Poetry, and many other literary magazines. Legacy of the Last World is divided into three numbered sections. Section I consists of twenty-one poems. The overwhelming feeling is of a love…