Review by Jennifer Jean – “Why does it look like that?” my seven year old Chloe asked a few weeks ago, pointing to my bare breast as I tried to squeeze into an outworn swimsuit. I liked her question. “It’s a poet’s question!” I thought, with outsized pride. But what I explained then is how, as an infant, she used to grab and kneed the bulbous flesh as she put the milky tip into her mouth. I told her that I was giving her love when I was giving her milk. That my substance, which is love, is expressed through my…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Nancy Vona – Felice Aull’s The Music Behind Me is a fine book of poetry. Aull’s poems are satisfying to read. I enjoyed the poems on an emotional level, but I was also challenged to be a better poet, to think more carefully about my choice of line breaks, and to consider how to make the ordinary astonishing and unique. The poems in this volume, like all good poems, illuminate the senses—especially the sense of hearing. The Music Behind Me is a book about sound–the sounds of wind, city sounds, “word songs” uttered in prison, and in particular…
So Mom, if you come there are rules: no talking about grandpa’s big C or making up your wacky stories. When you pack Christopher’s school lunch, don’t make peanut butter sandwiches, one of his friends might die, and no chocolate. He can have beef, but only grass-fed. True—he doesn’t eat much besides mac and cheese, so don’t try to force feed him broccoli or Brussels sprouts, none of those cruciferous vegetables. And if he gets his facts wrong, don’t correct him, he’ll throw a tantrum. Some dinosaurs are still alive, they’re called birds, and there are dragons, aka Komodo. And…
Review by Katie Baker – Coffee shops are considered diverse gathering places, establishments where all walks of life, both young and old, come to read, write, congregate and socialize- and most importantly, get their coffee fix. However, one forgets the importance of the ritual cup when they begin to read Ellaraine Lockie’s chapbook, Coffee House Confessions. The chapbook features poems written in and about coffee houses around the world, from the infamous Starbucks chain to more intimate settings in exotic locations in Italy and Portugal. Each poem is truly observant and one feels the depths of each character, no matter…
Review by Teresa Schartel Narey – In her debut poetry collection, Instructions for Preparing Your Skin, Ariana Nadia Nash unabashedly reveals how deeply personal experiences forever mark our bodies. The poems are honest and courageous; Nash makes wounds feel like badges of courage. Instructions for Preparing Your Skin was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2011 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. The book is divided into five sections, across which Nash takes the reader on interstate and international journeys in the quest for love, home, and, of course, the protection that comes from feeling comfortable in one’s…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader – In the twenty stories of Heather Tosteson’s Germs of Truth no one is left out. All told from a first-person viewpoint, they are populated with adopted children, reluctant mothers, lesbian couples, blended families, resentful sons and more. ‘More’ is also the title of the story ending the first section, which revolves around characters whose lives are touched in every way imaginable by their connections to sperm banks—not only the donors, the donees, their families and the children, but the workers as well. Most of the stories of the first section are rather short, though…
Review by Linda McCauley Freeman – There is one thing we all do, regardless of race, creed or color: we age. Since there’s no avoiding it, we might as well do it gracefully, thoughtfully, artfully. And so, editors Rycraft and What have created a collection of poems, essays, photos and cartoons on the female response to aging that presents us with a full spectrum of perspectives: the humor, the horror, the irony, the resistance and the resignation. By reading an anthology such as this we can stand shoulder to shoulder with others who are aging as we are, to have…
Review by Ann E. Michael – Poetry books offer the opportunity to travel, vicariously, to new environments. They also muster the reader out of her own perspective through the poet’s various chosen arts: syntax, imagery, rhythm, vocabulary, metaphor, and so on. Lois Marie Harrod’s latest collection cues the reader into the physical places the poems conjure, from Ringos New Jersey to the Great Barrier Reef; yet it strikes me that her work in this book deals less with regions and geographies than it does with internal places such as imagination and inter- and intrapersonal relationships. Harrod masters the strategy of…
My husband and I recently took Grace, who is seven, to see The Avengers. She had never seen a super hero movie before, and within two or three minutes, she was completely hooked. She reached her hands out to “touch” the shattered 3-D glass; she laughed at everything Iron Man said. And in the middle of one of the first battles, after sitting with her mouth hung open in amazement, she leaned over to me and patted me on the hand, and whispered as quietly as a seven year old can, “It’s OK, KK—the good guys always win in the…
I am a maker. Thoughts are words, words are the building materials. I hesitate to say bricks as they, the words, I mean, are as malleable as play-do, as changeable as water. I am, though, inert. My being is set, not as a feeling person. That changes with the hour although there are the usual preoccupations, but as a worker, I am inert. To clarify: the usual preoccupations are family, friends, world, in any order, and surviving childhood. The work is the work. My father called me every weekend morning, for years, to come and play baseball. Each time, for…