Review by Mindy Kronenberg – No one wants to talk about the sick child. Corrugated sadness, apologies baited with fear the mousetrap faces of those with healthy kids, shut. The difficult truth of these 21 skillful poems by Suzanne Edison on a mother’s challenges with a child’s chronic illness is crystalized in these lines from “Teeter Totter” (p. 16). It is truly a delicate yet brave exercise to express poetically the trials and hopeful episodes that rise from both fear and love. Women poets have dealt with the intimacy and revelatory moments of watching loved ones suffer and struggle, whether…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Mothers in Publishing: Changing the Literary Landscape – Join us on Saturday, May 7, in the Dewitt Wallace Periodical Room for “Mothers in Publishing: Changing the Literary Landscape” with editors Sarah Gambito (Kundiman), Karen Phillips (Words Without Borders), Mariah Ekere Tallie (African Voices Mag), Marjorie Tesser (Mom Egg Review), and Rebecca Wolff (Fence) about balancing the creative difficulties and benefits of editing with the creative experience of motherhood. This panel discussion features a diverse group of literary decision makers who will address questions including: What does it mean to be a mother working in publishing? How do we define the…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor – Is it possible for poetry to transcend grief? Can a visceral reaction in the body be expressed in language? In this debut poetry collection, Kelly Hansen Maher vacillates between an original vocabulary of loss— they needed a mother to bundle them/needed the fine thread of my alphabet (13) —and poems that are resounding cries, her own answer to a trauma so great that the doctors lost count. The poem “Loon Calls, Variations for Winifred” unfolds with the word wail and moves to orinthologists say it is a call for contact/canoeists think, not without sorrow (20). This ability to speak in hush and…
Photos here: http://themomegg.tumblr.com/post/146874422572/massachusetts-poetry-festival-2016
Review by Meg Reynolds – Winner of the 2014 White Pine Press Poetry Prize SOME GIRLS blends of contemporary and ancient story. McNally bends time on purpose, lending myth into women’s stories and humanity to myth. McNally remembers what is worth remembering and offers luminous characters to do the telling. With smart, witty, rich imagery she makes heroines of all of us and feeds the hungry in-between spaces in the stories we’ve been told. Here, we find Eurydice listening to the Rolling Stones, Eve experimenting in ornithology, and a contemporary mother feeling a whole ocean move as her child grows.…
Launch photos here: http://themomegg.tumblr.com/post/143376646167/themomegg-mer-2016-launch-party-change-issue
Kristin Prevallet – From dire to duty and all the muck in between, change is the only constant. This seems important to remember, lest what is fatal (fated, un-chanced) appear doomed to fail. Nothing is set in stone (made of particles, the stone, too, is subtle change at the molecular level. Like a face.) These are poems of chance and of change—they are language moving in time as compositions of waves form patterns. Or, they are poems dressing up, and dressing down. Of de-cluttering, and re-making memories from the stuff that has been left behind. They are poems haunted…
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor In Her Lingerie Drawer Five Years Later In her lingerie drawer two pearl and crystal hat pins a black flip phone that says Samsung Verizon my brother’s blue stained drawings from when he was five a braid wrapped in decaying thread chopped off when I was eight pictures of a strange man sitting on a beach chair his arms around mommy grandmother’s neatly folded fruit cake recipe hairpins in a hard plastic squeeze-em change purse my son’s first passport stamped canceled 1975 a torn tithe envelope with two singles inside five dollars folded in lined paper and a…
Rosa Alcalá Homophonic Translation We like things written on us, juicy not the least of which what is your team the ironies I thought my favorite sweatshirt (damaged in print shop) said a coat of sugar, my budding coquettish-ness, my wild code switch still yet my narrowing field But cringe years later at the truth Côte d’Azur a place I’ve never been well what message was that to anyone on the bus? How would wet snow turn to fine sand for any of us In desert storms? on Jersey shores? {http://www.shearsman.com/browse-poetry-books-by-author-Rosa-Alcala}
Betsy Andrews On Neptune Memorial Reef Don’t laugh at me, I told that guy, advance of the morning neoprene stuffing, the South Beach merchandise vertigo—explosives and spear guns, holsters and knives— eddying against the incoming tide. I mean: time, a long line fashioned with barbs, the hardee-har-har of middle age hooking my teen self and yanking her gasping up through the fathoms to lay like a fish in the palm of that guy, who laughed. Could she imagine me, in that chlorine sea at the neighborhood Y where, wild creature, she saved herself, finning off childhood’s dangerous shelf and…