Praise for Bluewords Greening: Bluewords Greening is a book about motherhood—love and family and fear and failure and mini-ninjas. We observe a mother’s bewildering experiences with her son as the poems detail his diagnosis with a rare form of epilepsy and the “bluewords” that result from his aphasia. The speaker is in deep conversation with the son’s frustrated and often surprisingly beautiful lexicon; she’s also in conversation with the work of contemporary visual artists and the craft of printmaking and the twelfth-century visionary, St. Hildegard. Stewart-Nuñez’s music and skilled syntax and stubborn insistence on the beauty of the world—even…
Author: Mom Egg Review
News from the Mom Egg Review Community – Marge Piercy selected Rachel Hall’s Heirlooms for the G.S.Sharat Chandra Book Prize. BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City published the linked collection in September 2016. Heirlooms begins in France in 1940 and follows a French Jewish family through the war and to America. It examines love and duty and the long reach of history. Joan Leotta: My new book, Summer in a Bowl, is out! This book tells of Rosa’s introduction to gardening and enjoyment of fresh vegetables by her Aunt Mary. When Rosa expresses sadness that summer has come to…
Review by Marcene Gandolfo In many ancient myths, the wound simultaneously provides cause for suffering and source for transformation. The poems in Judith Skillman’s latest collection, House of Burnt Offerings, reflect this view. While a number allude to mythological or literary figures, most live in the present rituals of daily life. They center on childhood memories, marital struggles, encounters with illness and aging, and the disappointments that result from unfulfilled desires. Many focus on the various wounds, both psychic and physical, that transform life and provide insight. Skillman’s language creates metaphor—another means of transformation—and these metaphors resonate most strongly throughout…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn I was drained, depleted, tired of carrying loads of emotional laundry around. I wanted to sleep deeply. We were not doing well, our little Asperger’s family in its tiny house…we were all now in the steam cooker, and it seemed the pressure would blow off the roof. (136) Dr. Darold A Treffert, MD, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, said this of the 1988 movie “Rain Man”: “Few disabilities will ever experience the kind of massive public awareness in such an empathic, uniformly well received and popular format that Rain Man has…
An exercise on Psalm 119 I am truly blameless. Or happy. Or neither one. Deep at night, I sit in the shadow of my own verses the furrows I tread with my mouth sheltering saplings that might never grow into a real oak or a maple dripping with syrup… The furrows get sticky, holding my knees and ankles— I need to grow new soil, massage the crumbs with my fingers, a sapling of earth itself that will carry dark, heavy fruit, moist with questions, a different source of food for my busy tongue, treading the lines between time and dawn.…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg The structure of We are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds creates an odd and interesting experience for the reader—we encounter chapter and verse of a life of emotional stops and starts, domestic rituals and rites of passage, while a continued narrative whispers along the bottom of the page to the end of the book. It is almost as if Sarah Sadie is poet and docent/chorus, living and reimagining the mythic and intimate moments of her life. Her work plays with our sense of time, and the words we use to express love, regret, domestic…
Review by Issa M. Lewis In the early chapters of Other Than Mother: Choosing Childlessness with Life in Mind, Kamalamani cites a researcher who claims, “Intentionally childless women have been reported as ‘deviant’” (42). This is the crux of her argument: that those women who have not given birth—either by choice, circumstance, or a combination of the two—are subject to raised eyebrows, intrusive questions, and judgment by what she calls a “pronatal” society. To give birth to and rear children is the default; to do otherwise, for any reason, is to assume a role of countercultural defiance. However, as…
Review by Carol Dorf When I had a “missed abortion” after two years of fertility treatments, a colleague (who was a daughter of the chief rabbi of Morocco, so given authority on these matters) told me she had a dream where I was sitting on a hill, playing with a daughter. For many of us, particularly those who have suffered from infertility, the dream-child precedes an actual child. In The Baby Book, Robin Silbergleid, shares her journey as an intentional single mother. She begins her journey at an age when many assume pregnancy is easy—27—but that doesn’t turn out to…
We sit in the kitchen my grandmother, my mother, me listening to the susurration of water boiling on the stove. Once the bottle is sterile, a careful spoon of powdered formula— my nephew needs to be fed every hour filling the tiny pocket of his stomach. Then the crying and flailing till he spits most of it up. He is a half-hatched chick in my arms— his lashless eyes holding mine, mouth opening and waiting, the bumps of his shoulders shadows of wings unformed when he flew untimely from the womb. My grandmother, sunk heavy in her seat, says: “You…