Curator’s Statement – Lorraine Currelley It was my honor to curate Mom Egg VOX Gallery, January 2016. A welcomed opportunity to curate a gallery whose theme is near and dear to me; Age and Aging. I reached out to a group of distinguished, accomplished and well respected poets and writers. I specifically wanted individuals with a respect for craft. Persons I knew would speak courageously and candidly about their experiences and perspectives in authentic unapologetic voices. Our gallery members are diverse and multi-faceted as shared in each bio. Some are members, supporters and individuals who have…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – Angie: “I believed it was best to jump headfirst into what you are most afraid of. For me, that had become a certain type of man: dangerous, huge, and hairy, a skewed vision of my birth father. I went after the spitters and snarlers. I attracted them the way rancid meat draws flies…” (119) There is no doubt that Linda Sienkiewicz knows families. Whether writing the Hungarian Vadas nest of “spitters and snarlers,” the Schirricks and their barely concealed animosity, or the Lowsleys where love teeters on an edge honed sharp by lies, Sienkiewicz hands…
Review by Kerry Neville – If clothes make the man, then shoes, according to It’s All About Shoes, make the woman. This book, subtitled, A Collection of Essays, Poems and Stories About Women and Their Unusual Relationship to Shoes, examines the emotional but serious relationship women have with footwear, from three-and-one-half inch “black satin spike heels” to ergonomic “Earth shoes”; from “lotus shoes” once used in Chinese foot binding to combat boots that “soak up blood” in Iraq. The collection is divided into three parts: “The Past,” “The Present,” and “Coda: Thoughts for the Future.” “The Past” often addresses the…
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…
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…