Review by B.A. Goodjohn “…burnt years / welfare cheese / dirty decades / stolen checks / lost kids / was it worth it / just to write / some fucking poems?” (121) – RETROGRADE is not a quiet, comfy collection. Initially, I had the sofa with its kitsch crocheted throw as location in which to read Perl’s work. I wasn’t three poems in before I had to decamp to the kitchen, to its harder chairs and its wipe-clean table. Perl’s poems—perhaps because of their upbringing on the Lower East Side, in its apartments and on its sidewalks—demanded a starker setting.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sarah W. Bartlett on Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write – HEAR ME, SEE ME: Incarcerated Women Write is a collection of the poetry and prose of over 60 women incarcerated in Vermont’s sole women’s prison, where over 85% are mothers. Much of their writing centers on stories of loss, shame, pride and despair surrounding disrupted relationships with children. Stories to break your heart, where addiction is stronger than love for the child ultimately left behind: … my first love, the one I gave away – her nose up to the window, watching me drive away. Crying…
Review by Lynne Shapiro I happen to like, really like, nests, eggs, and estuaries so Molly Sutton Kiefer’s book, Nestuary, instantly attracted me. Sitting at the Mom Egg table at AWP several years ago, a woman confided in me that she wasn’t sure about publishing in a magazine about motherhood. I replied, “Oh. I’m in it for the eggs” and paraphrased Jean Arp’s poem suggesting we “take out our eggs and lay them on the table of creation.” Kiefer’s book takes us through the physicality of one woman’s experience with the act of creation, her becoming a mother. Her book…
Review by Anne Marie Fowler – It is not lost on me that I was assigned to review November Butterfly as though the universe were contacting me through any means possible as I contemplate my own role as daughter, sister, wife, and mother—the very elements that shape this fabulous collection of poems that celebrates the female in all her guises, and the elements that are currently permeating the world of women in contemporary society. There is something so tender in the way that humans reveal and revere the experiences that have shaped who they are and who they will become.…
Review by B.A. Goodjohn – “Yeah,” [the nurse] smiled back. “He’s got nine lives, like a cat…”…After she left, I asked him, “Do you want to KEEP ON living nine lives?” Very clearly, smilingly, and maddeningly, he mouthed, “ten, eleven…” Shit, I thought. – STILL THE END is a hard book. It requires a reader willing to walk beyond a nursing home’s tastefully furnished reception to the often aseptic bedrooms beyond where families sit and wait—sometimes for years. It requires a reader ready for an account of love worn thin by constant need, a reader open to a writer who…
Review by Brooke Harris – Turning straw into gold is one impossible task. “Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name?” is a variation, dare I say a revision, of the rather-terrifying Grimms Fairytale. Zara Raab turns the strange story on its head and uses poetry devices to add humor and wit. From the first page the stage and tone are set: The cast? There’s the Mother whose daughter becomes the Queen, the Dwarf who pulls the strings, and the greedy one, the King. It answers the reader’s questions in jest. The end rhyme of strings and king adds to the darkly…
Review by Jill Kelly Koren – As a poet who left Indiana to teach in Texas, I entered Robin Silbergleid’s Texas Girl (Demeter Press, 231 pages) expecting to find my own story, but to my surprise I found what Harold Bloom says is the ultimate reason to read: to experience the other. In this unusual memoir, place becomes a character, and a small town in Texas cuts in on the poet’s dance with an Indiana college-town and a quondam lover. The book opens with an unusual conception: “My daughter was conceived over the phone with my on-again, off-again something-or-other.” Though…
Reviewed by Tessara Dudley – I Carry My Mother is dedicated: For my mother, Florence Newman January 25, 1928 — August 22, 2012 may her memory be a blessing In this collection of poems, Lesléa Newman explores a journey to loss. Each of the five sections, reflects a part of this process of losing and grieving a parent: “Prologue: Preparing to Depart”, “Part One: Stoic As a Stone”, “Part Two: Alive and Not Alive”, “Part Three: Quiet as a Grave”, and “Epilogue: Wherever I Go”. The journey moves from harsh illness to painful death, to her grief in the immediate…
Review by Samantha Duncan – So often, the conversation in the modern era of raising families revolves around excess. From the extensive list of “necessities” for newborns to parenting advice books, to toddler play groups and activity classes, to the endless slew of childrearing techniques, some of the simpler pleasures and takeaways one experiences when they start a family easily get lost in the hustle and bustle of family life in the twenty-first century. Rose Auslander’s chapbooks, Folding Water and Hints, are a refreshing reminder of the wisdom and memories domestic life gives to us. Water is ever present in…
Poetry Comics by Jessy Randall – “The Topology of Motherhood” The diagrams (without added text) originally appeared in: Roger Fenn, ed. Topology of Low-Dimensional Manifolds: Proceedings of the Second Sussex Conference, 1977. Berlin, 1979. Jessy Randall’s motherhood-related poems and poetry comics have appeared in previous issues of The Mom Egg and also in Mama Liberada, Mamazine, Motherwords, and Brain, Child. Her most recent book is Injecting Dreams into Cows (Red Hen, 2012). She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/