About Mom Egg Review MER editor Marjorie Tesser interviewed by Columbia University student Katherine Mullan. MOM EGG REVIEW is an annual collection of poetry, fiction, creative prose, and art that publishes work by and about mothers and motherhood. Celebrated writers and new talents explore the experience of motherhood from diverse perspectives and examine the nexus of motherhood with other identities, cultural and personal. Multi-ethnic and multi-generational, MOM EGG REVIEW tells important stories ignored or marginalized by other publications, and nurtures exciting literary talents. Mom Egg Review’s mission is to put fine literary work with diverse perspectives of mothers and motherhood…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Cynthia Hilts is a jazz pianist and vocalist, a prolific composer and lyricist, teacher, poet, practicer of many natural arts, and occasional painter. “Alexis” (and Zekai) is a rare pastel, as she usually works with watercolors. As a recording artist she has three CD’s under her name. A new CD with her chamber jazz ensemble “Lyric Fury” performing Cynthia’s original jazz compositions, will be released in spring 2014. She delights in the interplay of color, line, form, texture and harmony, within and between all her practiced and unpracticed arts. http://cynthiahilts.com
Review by Kathrine Yets – Everything comes down to the center of Tami Haaland’s collection When We Wake in the Night—the heart. No matter how hard I try, I am funneled there. The collection is divided into five sections—As Many Stories as Stars, Morning and Evening in Your Cup, Inquest, Late Constellation, and Silvery World. Each swirl with emotion into the middle like a nautilus shell. Let’s start light. The first section, As Many Stories as Stars, is filled with stories, from grandmother’s house to Cinderella on the steps. For the most part, these stories are lighthearted but each has…
Review by Linda McCauley Freeman – It’s been far too long since I’ve picked up a poetry book that I couldn’t put down. But from the opening poem in Still Life with Dirty Dishes, I knew I would not only read the book straight through, but that I would return to it again and again. What writer couldn’t identify with the following lines from the opening poem Underwood Typewriter, Old Mahogany Desk: Our ideas tapped and tapped and tapped themselves— vintage and vinous—across paper, halting only at the roller’s edge then soaring down a line— What human being couldn’t identify…
Review by Zara Raab – Levi’s earlier books, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, winner of the 1998 Walt Whitman Award, and Skyspeak (2005), give a large place to relationships: to a mother whose death she grieves and a father who stirs the strong admixture of anger and love on the palette of many second wave feminists. In Levi’s new book, Orphan, the subjects and significant others of her imaginative world have shifted to contemporaries or near-contemporaries, husband or admired poets. Orphan’s best poems give embodiment to the splicing of pain and love––what Alice Fulton reviewing Levi’s earlier work…
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Review by Carol Dorf Broken Narrative in Shira Dentz’ door of thin skins – At seventeen, my daughter and her friends call older men, by which they mean those past college age, who are interested in them, pedophiles. The middle-aged male narrative of nubile young thing with interest in older men certainly doesn’t seem to have anything to say to these young women. In door of thin skins, Shira Dentz uses a combination of prose, erasure and visual poetry to tell the story of psychologist in his sixties who sexually abuses his college-aged client. The variety of techniques Dentz employs…
Review by Nancy Gerber – It’s a pleasure to dive into Robyn Hunt’s debut poetry collection, The Shape of Caught Water. In rhythmic, evocative language, these poems chart the rising swells and quiet pools of human relationships. A young girl mourns the break-up of her parents’ marriage as she observes her father falling for another woman. Parents experience the eerie emptiness that descends when a child leaves home. A couple argue on New Year’s Eve, their explosive words echoed by midnight fireworks. A group of women gather for a writers’ retreat, the richness of their friendship reflected in the food…
Author’s Note: Kelly Ann Jacobson on Cairo in White What I Know about Birth – In creative writing classes, we are often told, “write what you know.” I amend that in my own writing to “write something inspired by what you know,” with an emotional truth that resonates but without the messy attempt to reconcile an actual experience with a created one. Zahra, the Egyptian mother character in my novel, is much different than me, but experiences many of the same experiences I did while engaged to an Egyptian and visiting his family in Cairo for eight days. Zahra also experiences…
We recently completed the process of responding to submissions for the upcoming issue of Mom Egg Review. This is always tough. We are all writers; we know how unpleasant it is to receive a “decline” response. So why do pieces get declined? Of course, there are always some that do not adhere to our guidelines: they are not by or about mothers or mothering, they have excessive word count, they have been published before. There are some pieces that, while heartfelt, are not as skillfully done as others. But the vast majority of submissions we receive are pertinent and well…