Review by Lorraine Currelley – The editors of Happiness The Delight Tree have succeeded in assembling a group of fine international poets representing Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and Oceania. Happiness The Delight Tree presents a global perspective of happiness. Some poems are deeply philosophical and others light and fun. The metaphors used are colorful, interesting and beautifully carved. Some poems are challenging and others resonated immediately with this reader. Happiness The Delight Tree is a weaving together of an international spirit of human connectedness. A global experience of humanity via happiness. In “In My…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – “‘Ding Dong Bell’ is a phrase Shakespeare used in several plays. In the original lyrics the cat was left to drown.” (8) DING DONG THE BELL PUSSY IN THE WELL is a collaboration that uses nursery rhyme as springboard from which to launch tiny commentaries on contemporary life. The poems and drawings that form the chapbook’s structure might take the reader to a consideration of that old chicken and egg riddle: Which came first—Kerness’s drawings or Lerner’s poems? Are the poems ekphrastic…or are the poems illustrated? Other questions arising from the partnerships might focus…
Review by Kerry Neville – Lisa C. Taylor’s Growing A New Tail contends with moments of rupture, when the past is upended and the future reinvented. These eighteen stories are short, lyrical meditations. Backstories are important but offered with realistic economy. Disease, death, and heartbreak are catalogued with matter-of-fact distance as we are here to witness the implosive aftermath. As Elsa says in “Visible Wounds,” the opening story, “The place where they cut her throbbed with knowledge that skin acquires when it is sliced open, must grow a hood to heal” (11). Restoration to pre-wounded life is impossible; yet, protagonists…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – “‘As the air grew darker a sudden sense of doom crept into the conversation, all the danger surrounding the children….Yes, danger traps were everywhere” (11). CROWD OF SORROWS, the latest work of fiction from Nahid Rachlin (author of the the memoir PERSIAN GIRLS: Tarcher ‘07), takes an apartment complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts as its setting, and a community of women as its characters—the community’s main players being Zora and her young daughter Anar. Zora has recently separated from her husband Martin, who wastes no time in installing a girlfriend into the old marital home in…
You, little movie theatre in Harlem, two blocks from my home, Do you remember how you took Mama and me in on weekends? Like magic on that big screen, you kept Mama sober. A huge tub of popcorn on our laps, smell of butter, just a few more hours to pretend we were happy. We were happy. Burgundy-crushed velour seats, edges worn, butter-stained, bittersweet, my mind wondering away before opening credits rolled. Would you go back to your dark room Mama? Little theatre on 147th and Broadway, we cried uncontrollably when closing credits for Ben started rolling. Michael Jackson’s tender…
for Beckett Rose before they took you from your bed inside me, before they made that exploratory sleuce through exoderm, endoderm, abdomen before your pale soft skin and hair like a tawny cat’s were presented to me disconcertingly already-clean and before that same cut would refuse to heal, reopening as if to remind how unfinished it is, this business of being born (if asked, I would reply that I’m only in my preface, preambling, while wordless, all wonder, you appear fully written. do days erase?) yes. before that. immediately before, or at least on that day when the pain came…
The women of my grandmother’s line are cloaked in polished oak. Their nipples bare, silk of budding blooms. I know my father by the cacti growing atop my lungs. The areolas pullulating from my desert chest sprout needles that prick lovers’ mouths. The women of my grandmother’s line do not wear abandon on their skin, they are the silk of budding blooms. I machete his DNA my skin a map of outstretched hands coaxing gangly chromosomes. The women of my grandmother’s line have gardens between their legs, groomed Eden. Father spins a web of spider legs between my thighs. I…
My Nephew’s teeth are straight like swans in a row better than ducks pretty target for foe I worry about his beauty is his grace what they seek to destroy? does he have Emmett’s eyes? Trayvon’s smile? No child’s nightmare What triggers the hunt? is it their hunger, or our blood? My nephew’s teeth are straight like his back when he walks no longer a toddler too late to teach him to bow How did he not bend? With the load of Emmett Or the burden of a smile erased? How long do miracles last? Nichelle Johnson is…
My mother died last May. She lived to sew her own designs dressed her only daughter like a baby doll contrived in custom made pink and lace, a traumatic misplace for a non-femme. My mother died last May. At home, in bed, alone gut stained rose flowered bedding displayed proof of her demise where she had laid choking on bile in denial of transition time. My mother died in May. Sent her off to the other side wherever she may be in style clustered red floras, gray mental casket blue and white rayon poke-a-dotted dress. No pink. No lace. …
My daughter has blossomed into a beautiful butterfly, She has learned to stop and smell the roses while avoiding bee stings, but She cannot avoid the pain that life brings. She still cries for little lost things, like Math books, keys, Puff-her magic dragon and grandma’s knees, that she never got to bounce on. I fall on scarred knees to pray she never cries over subtraction problems that divide the soul from spirit, multiplying her pain, played out on old piano keys. She once asked me what is ivory. I refuse to tell her it is just soap. I tell…