Review by Tessara Dudley Theory Headed Dragon is the first chapbook from Carol Dorf. Dorf is a high school math instructor and the poetry editor at Talking Writing, and though these two professions seem somewhat contradictory, in reading Theory Headed Dragon, they began to seem perfectly natural together. In fact, the poet brings many different aspects of life into conversation with each other to tease out truths about humanity today. A major theme of this collection of poems is time: the passage of time, and the idea of impermanence. In “The Early Morning Train,” Dorf comments on generations, not just…
Author: Mom Egg Review
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 20th edition of this collaboration in which scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA January 2017, Christen Clifford and Karen Malpede “The Pussy Bow” by Christen Clifford After live-streaming from her vagina, artist Christen Clifford decided to take…
Monica A. Hand departed this week. She was a brilliant poet, artist, and scholar, a loving mother and grandmother, and a long-time valued member of the Mom Egg Review community. She will be deeply missed. Here is a poem from MER Vol. 10 – The Body Monica A. Hand DiVida becomes pine evergreen coniferous with needle-shaped leaves woody cones. her thick and sticky sap turpentine her scent voluminous, audible her arms her legs her buttocks her head her toes something to sit upon soft like a cushion hard like the frame of a crypt the wood of any pine is…
Megan Wynne Artist Statement: I am interested in the transgenerational legacy of the mother-child dynamic, in which beliefs, behaviors, and past traumas haunt one generation to the next. In the Motherhood project, I work in collaboration with my two daughters and investigate my role as a mother in the context of the maternal legacy that I inherited. Through experimental and performative explorations in and around the home where I was raised, I reflect on the weight of the past as it is transmitted through me and will continue through my two children. In the work I use my maternal…
IDENTITY A folio edited by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach The poems in this folio consider the “Mom” identity from both the mother’s and child’s viewpoints and speak to the complicated relationship that exists between the iconic Mom and Mom as an individual. Each of the poems challenges us, in its own unique way, to confront the person that we may or may not want to be (or know) behind the Mom mask. As the speaker in Megan Merchant’s poem, Fallout Shelter so aptly states: I never even thought / that just once / my own mother / might…
Laurette Folk Retreat She came in the guise of my dog to lure me away, as Apollo lured Achilles away from the walls of Troy. I saw her from the window running through the marsh and had a choice to make, to follow her, or stay and do what others expected me to do—listen attentively to the poet reading, stay near my children who were being watched by respectable God-fearing teenagers in the next room. I opted to go (not that I chose her over them, but to me her name spelled f-r-e-e-d-o-m), follow her over a plank bridge…
Elisabeth Weiss Lost Mother Beautiful one of long ago who knelt with us when the house filled with a veiled peace useless to resist, when we knew the smell of your dress in the folds of sleep, in and out of consciousness, a blurred coupling of hands when kissed. Wherever you are, under tiled roofs I remember you and I remember loneliness under the chestnut tree as we all grew in it’s crooked shadow. I imagine you old around the eyes, looking bored, piling white papers in the kitchen as if you were there voluntarily. We all know how…
Dede Cummings Day Hike —for Sierra The snowshoe hare tracks have no trouble telling us the way. Our breath is hard and fast startling even the gnarled branches from their slumber. The etched mountain does not beckon from afar: rather its seat of glory defies gravity on a trail such as this we edge carefully over ice and our grippers secure the way. Never fearing to fall the urge to tell this child my story comes hard and fast, a claw mark on a beech tree with the delicate leaves still and kind. Moving around the forest daily, I am…
Dawn Paul My Life as a Dog The boy with his crooked tooth, his dying mother, her face like a haggard angel, the scruffy, scratching dog. The boy and I astonished and sickened to watch the kindly farmwife jerk the skin off a rabbit in one quick yank “taking off his pajamas.” I remember only that and the scene that ran through the boy’s memory like a newsreel: him on hands and knees, cavorting for his mother bare feet kicking up puffs of sand a headstand turned somersault while she watched, threw her head back and laughed. Yes. There…
Megan Merchant Fallout Shelter “Multiple-vortex tornadoes can appear as a family of swirls circling a common center, or they may be completely obscured by condensation, dust, and debris, appearing to be a single funnel.” New World Encyclopedia Hideaway bunkered into earth, where bodies shelter when the skyline cyclones and upturns machinery, anything not root-locked into the field, the updraft—an opera quivering glass to the breaking point. A phrase my own mother used because she hated cooking, would fury-whisk the batter slamming sides of the bowl, her hands outlier-bruised, dots of dough spattering like a stammer, squaring off against wind. She…