The Mom Egg Vol. 6 2008 Paper, 114 pp. Featured in this edition are prize-winning poet Sharon Dolin’s wry “To Worry, A Wallow,” “Marry Yourself,” by Joy Rose, lead singer of Housewives on Prozac, Caribbean-American poet Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s poignant “Nineteen Seventy Five,” and works by Radhlyah Ayobami, Corie Feiner, Glenis Redmond, and others. Contents Seven Continents Nine Lives (Excerpt) Fay Chiang Teeth Marks Cheryl Boyce-Taylor The Orange Picker’s Daughter Annette Daniels Taylor Mrs. Snow Annette Daniels Taylor Transylvania Ella Veres Maher Arar May Joseph If I Ain’t African Glenis Redmond Letters to Luzon Cristina Querrer They Lost My Vote…
Author: Mom Egg Review
The Mom Egg Vol. 5 2007 Paper, 101 pages. New mothers to grandmothers examine issues ranging from single motherhood, dating younger men, separation anxiety, the body, caring for older parents, the changing nuclear family, and sex. Featuring work by Alana Free, Nan Byrne, Tina deVaron, Annette Daniels Taylor, and others. Contents American Literacy MaryJo Martin Hey Adam Corie Feiner SUSU Nan Byrne Motherhood Nan Byrne The Leaving Game Meredith Fein Lichtenberg Lullaby Jill Shely School Days Golda Solomon The Candyman Radhiyah Ayobami 20 Radhiya Ayobami The Naked Girl Cassandra Neyenesch Breasts Joy Rose At Eleven and a Half Lee Schwartz…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett – Amy Dryansky’s newest poetry collection, Grass Whistle, was awarded the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. While writing this collection, Dryansky began a blog about the intersection of mother/artist/poet in her own and in other women’s lives. The blog establishes her mother/artist work as both important and interesting. The true gift of Grass Whistle is the proof that we can use whatever is at hand to make what we need. Every poem shines with transparent honesty about aspects of life and relationship we have been socialized to hide: “what I imagined spilled out, slopping/fake fairy dust over everyone/I couldn’t quite…
Review by RZ Wiggins – Mothers are simple, complex, opaque, vivid, loving, distant, devoted, and neglectful, all in a lifetime. From its first pages, this slim volume overflows with the above and with a mother’s abundant love and commitment. Rosalie Calebrese’s chapbook Remembering Chris is a memorial to a lost son. But the collection also shows the many sides to mothering through a voice that is at once surprisingly pragmatic and refreshingly honest. Aside from “Mixed Emotions” (3) which centers on mothering concerns (how many mothers haven’t felt these?), Remembering Chris’s poems ring with joy at both motherhood and grandmotherhood. Given the absence…
Review by Barbara Harroun – Samantha Duncan’s intimate, inventive, and gloriously imaginative chapbook-length poem The Birth Creatures examines and gives new eyes and voice to the post-partum experience. Duncan, the author of the chapbooks One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) and Moon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), explained the genesis of The Birth Creatures in a Blogging the Numinous interview with Julianna DiMicco: The Birth Creatures came from a few places. I wanted to reclaim my own postpartum experience, which I felt had been downplayed and not taken very seriously by those around me. I also think not enough is said about how bizarre pregnancy and childbirth are, so I…
Review by Kerry Neville – Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deeply ingrained in both popular and academic culture (spin-offs, references, paraphernalia, and the academic journal Slayage). Josh Whedon, the series creator, has explained that he explicitly developed Buffy as a feminist revision of the horror genre, taking as its center Buffy’s fight against universal monsters: loneliness, awakening sexuality, social norms, and oppression. Indeed, Buffy, our complicated heroine, the Slayer, born once in a generation, is tasked with protecting herself from the ordinary challenges of high school and the extraordinary challenges of vampires and demons, and with saving the world. But what…
Review by Jennifer Martelli – From the opening title poem where we are told, “Never mind what your mother says” (3) to the closing poem “Chained Reaction” where Betts writes The top of my mother’s hand is tan shallot skinand her shelter a crosshatched clam, a sealed mouth hiding sealed hands (64-66) Genevieve Betts creates a seismic movement across a continent, a country, a body in her debut collection, An Unwalled City. The reader is in “this limbo” where “flows blood from the breasts that give suck” (“Isis” 14-16). In the thirty-eight poems that make up this collection, Betts births and unearths…
Review by Christina Mock – Marianne Smith Johnson’s collection Tender Collisions is a rollercoaster of the loss, grief, joy, and love we experience every day. It pulls the reader out of the routine of daily life to remind her that life is fragile, and the human body breaks easily. The collection is divided into three stunning parts tied together thematically by the need for justice. Johnson brilliantly exposes the reader to the intimacy of daily life as a wife and mother. A private moment between spouses is lit up in “Duende Teases up the Night” through Johnson’s description of sounds: “When…
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth – Wisdom, wit, and compassion characterize Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s first book of poems, Imperfect Tense. A Professor of TESOL and World Languages Education at the University of Georgia, she charts her extensive terrain in the book’s first poem, “Whorfian Hypothesis”—which, as a note explains, asserts that “one’s language determines one’s conception of the world” (115). The engaging poems of the book’s first section, “Imperfect Tense,” grew from a Fulbright in Oaxaca during which the poet interviewed Americans tackling Spanish as a second language. Here are befuddled ex-pats who say “I’m pregnant” when they mean “I’m embarrassed” or “fuck a…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – His office is covered floor to ceiling / in photos of infants’ faces / stuck to the walls with long needles. / I lie upon a bed lined with butcher paper. (29) Experiencing life vicariously through poems—on falconry, on surviving an earthquake, on growing up blind…on whatever—fascinates me. Those poems open up worlds I am unlikely to visit. But there is something magical about poetry that hands over a known world. Such poetry opens a conversation that is full of questions: how will this poet narrate my world’s landmarks, its streets, its currency? might I remember…