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,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Review by Libby Maxey – Amelia Martens has published three chapbooks, but this is her first full-length collection of poetry. It’s a beautiful book in every respect, a true work of art. Her prose poems are short, most covering less than half a page, but they’re so dense and so full of the unspoken that my marginalia filled in most of the available space. The book is part of The Linda Bruckenheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, and Martens has won an Emerging Artist award from the Kentucky Arts Council, but there is nothing in these poems that feels strongly regional.…
Review by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez – Written from a heart expanded/ and pulsed back to life (“How It All Started” 3), Darlene Pagán’s poems burn with the scarred/ hide of broken love (“The Wolf and the Kid” 13), the mad harvest of sexual desire (“Blackout” 26), and the vast/ universe of grief (“Dark Matter” 59). In this compelling series of narrative and list poems, Pagán’s precise language and imaginative metaphors ignite her lyrical endings: The worms / …return / root to its shrub, blade / to grass, bulb to bud. If / only they could knit back the boy…
Review by Judy Swann – Women are constantly tempted to measure reality in terms of the measurements of Father Time, which are linear, clocked. This is a trap. Our gynocentric time/space is not measurable, bargainable. It is qualitative, not quantitative.–Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology 41) In The Kingdom Where No One Keeps Time, Helen Ruggieri manages to lift time from the prisons of chronology and ethnicity, and she does so with bravura. The opening three poems, a cycle called “The Fates,” can be read again and again with never-diminishing pleasure. The Greek poet Hesiod was the first to write about the Fates.…
Review by Tessara Dudley – Wintering and The Gunnywolf are preoccupied with race. Wintering follows Lewis and Clark’s expedition, using scraps of journal and letters to reconstruct the journey while physically following their footsteps with family in tow. The Gunnywolf reflects on racial events, organizing them around the building of a family and the Black American myth of the Gunnywolf. Megan Snyder-Camp’s second and third books, Wintering and The Gunnywolf are different from each other in tone and content, but similar in theme: these books feel out what it is to be white in America. Wintering reflects on the erasure…
Review by Issa M. Lewis – The complexity of motherhood is often overlooked; we are frequently urged to consider only sentimental images of manicured women playing with their remarkably well-mannered infants on white sofas. While joy is certainly a significant piece of the experience, the title of this poetry collection reminds us that it is not the only one. In The Dead in Daylight, Melody S. Gee skillfully demonstrates that to become a mother is a complicated process of both creation and loss, and it ushers the living into the process of dying—literally darkness to light and back again. The…
Review by Hannah Cohen – How does one write the human form for all its imperfections and faults? Jen Karetnik’s poetry collection American Sentencing renders fully the struggle and highs of the physical body and mind and of other invisible challenges such as womanhood and its accompanying health issues. An accomplished writer and critic based in Miami and winner of several poetry prizes including the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Prize, author of the cookbook Mango and two other poetry collections (Brie Season and The Treasures That Prevail), Karetnik has a poetic voice that commands respect and is easy…
Review by Jennifer Martelli – a [live] As she is buried [alive] structure is born. a [ ] live. (37) The Walled Wife is a four-part structure with the beating heart of the speaker/wife, conscious and watching as walls are inexorably stacked, sealing her within. “Put her in it;/let it consume/her–” (“Footnote #6” 43). By structuring the book with walls of research, footnotes, and story, and by placing a modern sensibility in the center, Nicelle Davis creates an evolving structure: The Walled Wife emerges as an eternal building with a female voice immured within its framework. Davis draws from two…