– WITH ANIMAL is a collaborative book of short stories, written by Kelly Magee and Carol Guess, that imagines the implications of humans who become pregnant with animals. Pregnancy and childbirth are times when surreal and sometimes unexplainable things really do happen, so it was a natural extension to take these stories into the realm of magical realism. It’s pretty common, for example, for women’s hair to get thicker during pregnancy, so if she was pregnant with a sheep, it seemed to follow that she’d grow fur; women crave specific and sometimes odd foods during pregnancy, so if a woman…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Bunny Goodjohn …From her mother dimension /high among the fluorescent lights, she // coached me through the solar system of house, / over thresholds into the galaxy of backyard, / through the gate into the universe of town and beyond. (“The Grip” 88) Before I launch into a review that shamelessly lauds Jim Peterson’s writing, it is only fair that I disclose how well I know both the man and his poetry. We met in 2001 when I was an undergraduate at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. I was a “mature student” about to declare as a Political Science major…
Reviewed by RZ Wiggins Anyone who has been in a cross-cultural relationship will empathize with the frequent cultural misunderstandings and the awkwardness of family and friends who don’t speak the same language that are prominent in Tracy Slater’s memoir. The book is testament that such obstacles can be overcome. Slater meets her husband-to-be, Toru, when in her late thirties, an independent, Ph.D. professional. Reluctant to relocate from her native Boston, she declares herself “bicontinental,” maintains her apartment, commutes to her job teaching MBAs to write, and develops a literary series sited in Boston and Tokyo. Japanese can be reserved towards…
Review by Ivy Rutledge – In The Beginning Things, Bunny Goodjohn* pulled me right into the world of Willowswitch Lane, where twelve-year-old Tot Thompson has been displaced from her home and into the bedroom of Gareth Strand. There, on his sailboat-printed sheets, Gareth “fed her lines and she ate them like candy,” and Tot dreams that their secret moments are solid love (57). Goodjohn knits into this narrative the stories of Elaine, a woman abandoned by her husband and left to raise Tot and her fifteen-year-old sister Dorothy, and Dan, Elaine’s father-in-law, who has just lost his wife. Dan…
Review by Nancy Gerber Grief is heavier than concrete. A mother’s grief is fierce, dark and insatiable as the pit of hell. That’s what I learned from Vanilla Milk, Chanel Brenner’s new memoir in poems about the death of her six year old son, Riley, from a ruptured AVM (arteriovenous malformation, a tangle of abnormal blood vessels) in his brain. The night Riley died, Brenner sat down at the computer and wrote a poem.And kept on writing poems. When she went to the supermarket. When someone asked her how many children she had. When Geoffrey the Giraffe from Toys ‘R’…
Review by Libby Maxey Some poetry begs to be understood; some challenges the reader to understand. Then there’s the poetry that doesn’t ask us for anything; it seems complete in itself, regardless of what we understand. In general, Emily Wolahan’s Hinge fits into the latter category. Understanding is an open question and an important one, recurring throughout the book, but Wolahan knows better than to make things clear when they aren’t. Her poems aren’t the prosaic kind that tell vivid stories or create defined characters; even the images can be elusive, and moments of jumbled grammar can leave the reader…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn Some of the fictions you will read here are full-fledged stories, including the smallest one, at 27 words….But empowered by their smallness, to be fictions all they need to do is lie. (Robert Olen Butler “A Small Introduction” xiii) Who could not be intrigued by a slim volume of bite-sized lies? These stories, selected by Tara L. Masih and her team, were nominated by a combination of journal editors, publishers, and two “roving editors” who hunted down gems that might otherwise have been overlooked. The result is THE BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2015, a gorgeous object in…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg – Love, its promise and disillusionment, episodes of unexpected whimsy and deep despair, is masterfully orchestrated into a carnival of words and images in this distinctive collaborative effort by Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross. In the Circus of You bravely shares the disassembling of a marriage and the rebuilding of the self, the deconstruction of the familiar-turned awkward gestures of domestic routine, while it takes the reader on the path to a place of strengthened resolve, persistence, solace, and, ultimately, survival. Borrowing from the frightening visages and self-conscious discomfort in visiting a freak show, the…
Review by Mara I. Amster – It has long been my pleasure to introduce upper-level students to my colleague Bunny Goodjohn’s first novel, Sticklebacks and Snow Globes (The Permanent Press, 2007). The novel brings readers into the 1970s world of British council flats, adolescent girls, and the pains and pleasures they undergo as they navigate their lives within and outside their front doors. It is a book that makes me want to open it again as soon as I have finished it. Goodjohn’s first poetry collection, Bone Song, the winner of the 2014 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry,…
Review by Carole Mertz – Williams’ poems move from death to life and from life to death as she traverses themes of miscarriage, fertility in woman and in earth, scenes of grief, but scant joy. A tone of quiet regret underlies many of the verses. Any mother who has lost a child will appreciate the stark images of emptiness and sorrow conveyed in “Song” and “Eight Weeks.” There are no specific divisions in this short collection. We experience free verse poems about a woman’s desire to conceive, birth, loss of a child, loss of a parent, the caring of a…