Review by Grace Gardiner At first glance, the premise of Katie Manning’s fourth collection, A Door with a Voice, a free digital chapbook available for download from Agape Editions’ Morning House series, seems simply and obviously rendered. Manning, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, prefaces the chapbook’s sixteen poems with an artist’s statement that outlines her process of composition whereby she “us[es] the last chapter from one book of the Bible as a word bank for each poem” (iii). Furthermore, the contents page pairs…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lorraine Currelley Jamaican culture is cast as a main character in Here Comes the Sun. Readers get to experience Jamaican culture through a socio-political and economic lens. Nicole Dennis- Benn has woven together a story that is complex and entertaining, one that exposes the socio-political, cultural and economic hardships and mechanics of a system rooted in colonialism and oppression; a story of Jamaican tourism vacationers do not get to see. The intersection of tourism and poverty. The exploitation of Jamaica’s impoverished. The feelings of disgust for tourists, kept buried in the bellies of Jamaica’s residents, invisible to tourists.…
Brainwalk by May Joseph On October 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy enveloped downtown Manhattan in a total blackout. The terrifying reality of living on the top floor of a tall skyscraper without electricity, a generator or emergency lights hit home. My husband fell down the stairs in the Sandy blackout and sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. A long coma, total memory loss, speech loss, cognitive dysfunction and paralysis followed. The journey to normality took over three years. Chapter 8 Brainfreeze What is crucial to this state of perpetual uncertainty is cultivating optimism, even humor. My eleven year old little…
Mom Egg Review Online Contributor Publication Agreement The contributor, “you,” represent that the submitted work is your original work, that you own the rights to the work and that Mom Egg Review (“MER”) may publish the work on the Mom Egg Review website, http://merliterary.com (“the website”). You grant MER non-exclusive worldwide right to publish the work on http://merliterary.com and MER’s other online organs, and to distribute all or a portion of the work in any language worldwide. Website posts are archived indefinitely. You grant MER the right to use your name and likeness and information about you on the website…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Susan Roney-O’Brien, a poet and teacher, won first place in the Worcester County Poetry Association contest, judged by Mary Oliver, and was voted Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English. Her chapbook, Farmwife, won the William & Kingman Page Poetry Book Award. Her work can be found in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Diner, Ekphrasis, Stillwater Review, Block Island Poetry, and many other literary magazines. Legacy of the Last World is divided into three numbered sections. Section I consists of twenty-one poems. The overwhelming feeling is of a love…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn Writers plunder, excavate, and strip-mine without regard for the consequences to others. They suck their loved ones dry of vital fluids, revealing their deepest fears and yearnings. They expose the most precious secrets of their friends and families, then take all the credit and get all the applause (10). In the small space of this essay collection, Addonizio covers a lot of ground. She takes us to conferences with writers, on dates, and into dark tussles with vodka, good intentions, and compulsion. But it is when she sits us down with family that I feel the…
The Exit Coach Megan Staffel How do we find the courage to change? In The Exit Coach, a collection of six stories and a novella, the characters arrive at an impasse that requires them to step out of the wreckage of their habituated lives. It is the entrance of an unexpected voice–a visitor from France, a retired talent scout, an invisible friend, a midnight phone call, or even a wild animal–that disrupts their patterns of behavior and illuminates the possibilities they’ve been blind to, pointing the way to an exit they’ve dreamt of, but lacked the courage to enter. “These stories…
J.P. Howard, the poet and founder and curator of the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, has joined the masthead of MER Online. J.P. will be an Editor-at-Large, and will curate and edit craft posts, interviews, and other online featured work. Welcome, J.P.!
Reviewed by Anne Britting Oleson When the unthinkable happens, what do we tell our children? When they are born to us, we have ideas about what kind of people we wish them to grow into, but after the nuclear apocalypse, how do we revise our plans? This is the emotional core of Sarah Lang’s For Tamara, a book-length poem narrated by an unnamed woman who, it transpires, is both incredibly strong and incredibly vulnerable. Having watched on television the annihilation of major U.S. cities—until there were no longer any broadcasts nor any electricity to watch with—she finds herself desperately trying…
Alana Ruben Free and Akilah Mosley, Co-editors “Stretch Marks” – “Stretch Marks” is collection of poetry by a group of English language writers who have, temporarily or permanently, made their home in Israel. Whether born speaking English, Dutch, German, Hebrew or Arabic, each of us has had to stretch to adapt to a new tongue, new culture, and/or new religion. The pleasures and pains of birthing ourselves into this ancient-young country have marked our body-souls. This collection is influenced as much by the desert’s spoken words and the Galilee’s mystical prayers as by our individual pilgrimages…