Review by Christina Mock – Marianne Smith Johnson’s collection Tender Collisions is a rollercoaster of the loss, grief, joy, and love we experience every day. It pulls the reader out of the routine of daily life to remind her that life is fragile, and the human body breaks easily. The collection is divided into three stunning parts tied together thematically by the need for justice. Johnson brilliantly exposes the reader to the intimacy of daily life as a wife and mother. A private moment between spouses is lit up in “Duende Teases up the Night” through Johnson’s description of sounds: “When…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth – Wisdom, wit, and compassion characterize Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s first book of poems, Imperfect Tense. A Professor of TESOL and World Languages Education at the University of Georgia, she charts her extensive terrain in the book’s first poem, “Whorfian Hypothesis”—which, as a note explains, asserts that “one’s language determines one’s conception of the world” (115). The engaging poems of the book’s first section, “Imperfect Tense,” grew from a Fulbright in Oaxaca during which the poet interviewed Americans tackling Spanish as a second language. Here are befuddled ex-pats who say “I’m pregnant” when they mean “I’m embarrassed” or “fuck a…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – His office is covered floor to ceiling / in photos of infants’ faces / stuck to the walls with long needles. / I lie upon a bed lined with butcher paper. (29) Experiencing life vicariously through poems—on falconry, on surviving an earthquake, on growing up blind…on whatever—fascinates me. Those poems open up worlds I am unlikely to visit. But there is something magical about poetry that hands over a known world. Such poetry opens a conversation that is full of questions: how will this poet narrate my world’s landmarks, its streets, its currency? might I remember…
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…
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…