Susan Rich My Mother Returns From the Dead to Appear on Oprah ~ after January O’Neil She will say that silence was my favorite response more than sure, why, of course, or yes. She will say she never understood me as if she’d given birth to a dromedary or a quail. My mother returns to her moment of fame to say, and then she refused to eat meat. That some years I’d lock myself in my room come out only for snacks, then go right back inside. She will say I was secretive like a spy, a double agent,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Begin with a free-writing exercise of the plot of the narrative. After reading what you have written. Circle or highlight the areas of the story that you think are poignant. Next, create short haiku-like verses for each of the areas you have identified. (You can also write couplets or single lines.) Make sure that you choose strong action verbs and rich words which conjure up the emotions that you would like to infuse into your poem. Create images that appeal to the senses, for example, “The sun kicked heat in our faces” or “Daylight like a fine fan spread from…
This piece explores using family photos and other personal items as a way to enter poems. Writers can use journals, family photos, oral histories and/or a combination of the above as writing prompts to enter poems. Questions that often come up when using photos or oral histories to enter our poem, include: Whose story are we telling? How important is it that our poems be historically accurate? When do we give ourselves permission to honestly write our painful stories? What family secrets are waiting to be written? Is this our story to tell? You can use family photos, personal journals,…
Poets and Performance Whether you are doing a performance of your poems or reading them – you the poet want to present your poems as best you can. Right? What does that mean? Once a friend who was a jazz singer did a rehearsal of her performance. She arrived late, and sang looking out of a window- bored and distracted with her own performance. I posed a question to her – if you do not care about your performance why would an audience want to listen to you? Many poets treat the performance or reading of their poems as an…
It starts with a whisper. An image. A single word. An idea so subtle that if you don’t sit still, it will evaporate by the time you blink. That is poetry. More than any other genre of writing, I feel that poetry is able to weave the gossamer threads of our collective consciousness into a blanket or a gong, a bolt of lightening or a warm kiss. But you have to become skillful enough to convey these images to readers with the same intensity that they appear in your mind. And like any other craft, this takes dedication and practice.…
Jennifer Jean Speculating Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding around the heath/ and the desolate fens. ~lines 103-4, Beowulf 1. Sometimes, Grendel is a fist— is 5 or so dicks digging into 1 proverbial palm in 1971. 2. Sometimes, they’re my father. The timing’s right. 3. Sometimes: I was in there—the box inside the gift box. Inside mom—my pummeled fetal skull & 5 dicks fighting for rights: sharding her, making her guilty for wanting smokes at dawn near the Venice Beach boardwalk in 1971. She refused her own words for years. 4. Sometimes:…
Megan Buchanan Diamonds Heat the House What you have is exactly what I’m always looking for, he said. How soon can you come by? Monday’s good, I said. And there go the Victorian diamonds worn twice in ten years. The magnifying glass says Russian. Undergrad graduation gift (thank you, Mom) – sold for a Smith College deposit, a little propane in a hollow tank. Long winter, little work. Worth it. Done. And there go the wedding rings – sweet crescent moon with tiny diamond stars sparkling on both sides, whether coming or going. And the other an enameled bluegreen…
Danielle Jones-Pruett Elegy in Search of a Speaker I would like to explain how the house on fire is different than the house she set on fire. It’s cavernous. My mind can’t find the edges, the walls. Soot and ash, but nothing solid. I obsess over the details of a doorknob: the tarnish of hundred year old brass, wreaths of engraved flowers burning into her palm when she pops it off, puts it in her pocket. It’s heavy, too heavy, for the worn fabric of her dress, but it keeps me from thinking of the knife, of how she…
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth “To question history is to watch the chaos of its particles / glisten into discernible patterns,” Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes in a poem called “Hybrid Algorithm” (83), and this is the central project of her deeply engaging second book, There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air. One epigraph for the book is James Baldwin’s acerbic comment, “What Americans mean by history is anything they think they can forget.” But Jamahl Dunkle’s work is to make us remember, through fact and imagination—to create our sense of a place that is at the center of American history…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Brenda Kelley Kim, a freelance writer and weekly columnist, writes with a down-to-earth style that makes you want to pour a cup of coffee and settle in for the afternoon. Her first book, Sink or Swim, is a series of short essays on managing the chaos of life as a woman and a mother. Each essay starts with an epigraph that serves as a jumping off point; then she expands on each subject in a truly delightful way. Her topics include cooking, shopping, friendships between women, stereotypes, dogs, travel, and work, among others. She writes…