Review by Annamaria Formichella After twenty years of publishing Literary Mama, a publication dedicated to writing for and by mothers, current and past staff members created a space to share their own stories in Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology. What strikes the reader most powerfully in this volume is the honesty with which this collection explores motherhood in all of its complexity. Thirty different writers, representing various ages, backgrounds, and family histories, express their truth in essays, stories, and poems. In a serendipitous coincidence, I found myself with this book in hand on Mother’s Day, riding…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Genoa Yanez-Alaniz Severing Maria In the photo she texted her excessive and carmine uterus — sits inside a sterile dish Her motherhood noduled — dead-fleshed and disposed severed limb of life once divining deity of Coatlicue — vigil of body and earth A newborn cries red-faced and gasping for that first burst of sacrifice served survival at mother’s breast — her enduring gift of sustenance Celebrated memory of gilded crown — of quinceañera princesa Curious reach for that alluring and elusive gasp of pulsing crimson honeysuckle bud and drip — piqued angel shape of sweetness Maria, spirit and embodiment of…
MER Bookshelf – June 2024 Staff Picks – new books of fiction, memoir, and poetry. –Compiled by Melissa Joplin Higley. Alison Stone, Informed, NYQ Books, May 2024, poetry Pulling traditional forms into the 21st century, Alison Stone uses pantoums, ghazals, a jeweled sonnet crown, and other structures to explore the subjects of contemporary life. Love, sex, family, politics, and the pandemic are both confined and liberated into the frameworks in which Stone places them. Claiming and owning these forms allows Stone to bring a rich and layered music to these poems, leaving the reader both moved and transformed.…
Writing Loss in Bits and Pieces: An Interview with Eileen Vorbach Collins about Love in the Archives: a patchwork of true stories about suicide loss Interview by Diane Gottlieb To live is to experience loss. Whether it be the loss of a job, a dream, a marriage, a loved one, we will all find ourselves, at one point or another, in the throes of grief. But some losses loom larger than others. Losing a child is one such loss, one that Eileen Vorbach Collins was faced with when her 15- year-old daughter Lydia died by suicide a little over twenty…
Review by Sharon Tracey Lady Wing Shot, the third prize-winning poetry collection by Sara Moore Wagner, takes us deep inside the life and times of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, a woman whose fame and legend has outlived and somewhat eclipsed her. From the first poem, “Annie Oakley as a First God” (13), Wagner writes her into life in vivid poems that weave historical facts, myth-making, and personal history. The poet is a terrific storyteller as she writes about the poise and power of a sharpshooting girl from an earlier era who can still speak to our time and America’s worship…
In “The Mother Artist,” Author Catherine Ricketts Imagines A World Shaped By Care Review by Kate Lewis The central question in author Catherine Ricketts’ new work of non-fiction, The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity, comes early on: “How might our world be humanized by work—art work, any work— made through a mother’s eyes?” (11) For Ricketts, the transformational experience of mothering – the tending to vulnerable bodies, the creation of communities, the constant giving of care – has the potential to shape not only art, but through art, it has the power to change the world.…
Review by Claire Raymond Franco-American poet Jeri Theriault’s Self-Portrait as Homestead envisions the marks that our histories leave on our bodies and on the houses that hold our bodies as we pass through them, bringing together domestic space and identity in elegant, if at times emotionally painful, poems. Although the revelations of the book can be intimate, bringing us into tender family and personal histories, the tone is notably restrained. The poems keep a kind of sacred distance from their subject matter, granting the reader a clear and luminous space to encounter the poet’s words. The poems’ structures are…
Review by Celia Jeffries The phone that doesn’t ring in this memoir is the one that should be connecting Lara Lillibridge to her father. The father who moved to Alaska when she was four, forcing her to chase after him, “flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket, beg him to look at me.” (13) Subtitled “Essays on Yearning”, Lillibridge explores the edges of responsibility and self-preservation in a mosaic pattern, adjoining long-form essays with searing vignettes from the life she lived in response to his abandonment, intersecting poetry, braided…
Review by Melissa Ridley Elmes Sherre Vernon’s work has appeared in over 100 venues including The Chestnut Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Westchester Review. Following her 2006 hybrid postmodern novella Green Ink Wings, which was the winning manuscript of the 2005 Elixir Press Chapbook Competition, and 2007 chapbook The Name is Perilous, this first full-length collection, Flame Nebula, Bright Nova, is centered on the journey from childhood to motherhood, tackling the topics of emotional trauma and mother-daughter relationships. Organized into four sections (“Flame Nebula,” “What Is Flammable,” “Gravity,” and “Bright Nova”), the collection’s 45 poems range in form from…
New fiction, both novels and short stories, memoir, and poetry. Eileen Vorbach Collins, Love in the Archives, Apprentice House 11/23, nonfiction (suicide). Eileen Vorbach Collins’s Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, is a collection of linked narrative essays weaving themes of child loss, suicide, interfaith marriage and the natural world. Many of the essays have been previously published. Two were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The book has received a Pencraft Best Book Award, and is a finalist for the Story Circle Network’s Sarton Award and a Forward Indies Award. “In prose as clear…