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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Not for Mothers Only Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing Edited by Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff & with a foreward by Alicia Ostriker Not for Mothers Only collects poems on a range of subjects under the motherhood umbrella, some intimate and personal, others historical and political. ““The poets in this anthology have been ravished, whacked, illuminated, blown away by the experience of motherhood. The thousand experiences. The thousand interruptions. The fact that it is never what we expected, and that it is overwhelmingly intense. The intensity of the poems here bespeaks both the power of maternity in bending us…
Mom Egg Review is pleased to announce this year’s Pushcart Prize nominations: Poetry: Nadia Colburn, “The Physical World” Ann Fisher-Wirth, “In That Kitchen (She Speaks to Herself)” Owen Lewis, “Urgency” Essay: J.P. Howard, “Black Lives Matter: A Mama’s Perspective” All were published in MER Vol. 14 “Change” (2016). Congratulations and good luck to the nominees!
Review by Deborah Hauser The women in Seven Parts Woman, Marjorie Power’s second full length poetry collection, are mature; they are crones; they are changed; they knit, wear shawls, and sit in rockers as expected. What is delightfully unexpected is how Power engages the reader as these women face illness and loss and forge ahead to find comfort and peace in “a blue day, acacia in bloom, a yellow blaze” (82). The title poem, “Seven Parts Woman, One Part Art,” considers the relationship between the patient and her male surgeon. Composed in the third-person past tense, the form…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn Whenever I read Kim Addonizio, I feel a little jacked up, a little…dangerous. It’s as if I know she’s going to open a lid, not only on her world, her life, her family…but also on mine. Mortal Trash proves to be no exception. Addonizio is the mistress of metaphor. In “Manners,” a poem to tear out and refer to as a map to the strangeness that is modern life, her narrator hands down advice that narrows into a stark image: When the pulley of your childhood unwinds the laundry line of your dysfunction, here is a…
Review by Janet McCann The title The Language of Little Girls instantly set loose an earworm for me, that being “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” But this refrain did not stay with me even through the first page of the book. The girls and women in this collection are not delicate sentimental creatures, but rather fascinating and sometimes alarming women steeped in the lore of the female, connecting up with nature in unexpected ways. Kate Falvey is on the editorial board of the N.Y.U. Bellevue Literary Review and is editor in chief of the 2 Bridges Review. She teaches at…
Review by Deborah Hauser Cathleen Calbert’s fourth book, The Afflicted Girls, which won the Vernice Quebodeaux “Pathways” Poetry Prize for Women, is part history (though not meant to be historically accurate), part tribute, and part social critique. The collection opens with “First Wife,” a dramatic dialogue in the voice of Lilith, and closes with “The Princess Bride,” a tribute to Calbert’s friend. In between, these pages give voice to an array of women from Florence Nightingale to Zelda Fitzgerald in a variety of styles. “Talking Cure” and other poems use found language. “At Chawton Cottage” and “′The Misses Bronte’s Establishment…