The Mom Egg – 2012 Reviewed by Tanya Angell Allen In New Pages http://www.newpages.com/item/4908-the-mom-egg-2012-06 “Before reading The Mom Egg, one might question why, if thousands of successful contemporary writers are also mothers, do we need an annual literary publication which “publishes work by mothers about everything, and by everyone about mothers and motherhood.” The first answer is that Editor Marjorie Tesser compiles a magazine that’s both as good as any middle-range literary magazine on the market and better than many anthologies. Sure, it’s inspiring to see the good work of so many mothers gathered together, but it’s inspiring to read…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Virginia Bell In Eve Packer’s most recent book of poems, New Nails, the speaker delights in the notion that “people are strange when you’re a stranger.” She interviews, chats up, and eavesdrops on strangers she encounters everywhere, from the subway, corner bars, locker rooms, and steam baths, to 42nd Street, porno stores, lingerie shops, peep shows, and, as the title suggests, nail salons. Through these often intimate—and always revealing—exchanges with strangers, she re-shapes our perceptions of gender, the urban landscape, global formations, and even events that defy representation (the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11). In the title poem,…
Review by Katrinka Moore – To read Holly Anderson’s The Night She Slept with a Bear is to plunge into a beautiful and harsh world, fully lived in. These interwoven poems weave chaos into a coherence that you sense rather than analyze. While each story, each fragment, draws you in, it’s the way the parts mesh with the visual design and the music that makes reading Bear an experience worth delving into. A line from “Sheherezade v. 2,” describing another book, could apply to this one: “It almost looks like the little stories are chasing the idea of a narrative…
Review by Moira Richards – The scent of summer clings to dampened soil; we long to turn it under, let the living nestle down beneath the leaf mulch, as we, inside our houses, turn on lamps against November, wait again for spring. And so ends the last poem in this collection – a collection of poems about a family and about love; a collection of love poems for family members present, and family members alive only inside warm houses of memory. In The Lives We Live in Houses, Pauletta Hansel burrows beneath the leaf mulch of daily life and draws…
When I come upstate in your third trimester, we take fetch-crazy Otis for a walk; the centimeter gained each week makes you the ball that O runs after. And I feel Ruby cause a quake along the equator of your globe-like belly. Like a misplaced library book as fines pile up, you are punishingly overdue. So for the next visit we take it easy, playing the games that will be set aside until Ruby becomes old enough not to swallow toxic Legos, tiny Tinker Toys, the small body parts from Operation. The phone call after I return home says that…
On Motherhood: A Literary Journal Explores and Inspires Review of Mom Egg, Spring 2012 by Renee Beauregard Lute Published in The Review Review http://thereviewreview.net/reviews/motherhood-literary-journal-explores-and-inspires Rating: Five Stars Keywords: Conventional (i.e. not experimental), Family focus, Theme issue, Women focus I have been a mother for nearly five weeks, now. It’s like being the queen of a country where I don’t know the language. It’s also the best thing ever. Ever. I wear pajama pants and breast milk all day, every day, and I can’t imagine anything better. As I type this review, tiny Madeline is in her bassinet next to me,…
My Face, My Face After so long I couldn’t decide whether it was age making me uglier or thick hair swamping my features so I drove 30 miles once, twice, three times to my hairdresser, but it wasn’t any better in the mirror— So I separated my coifed bangs pulled off the fraudulent streaks with my daughter’s tiny clips and found my face like my mother must have wanted— narrow brow, steely eyes lipsticked my broad mouth, as if it were art. Before Breasts I was happy, and slept all night long. Everyone loved me. I climbed like a…
Oblong in air catapulted into somersault You landed in arms ready to wash the blood from your journey. sniffing me furry without hair My voice no longer an echo. L. B. Williams is the author of the memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf, (Hamilton Books, 2005) www.letterstovirginiawoolf.com. Her work has appeared in such publications as Washington Square, The Mom Egg, The Image of Women, Mamas and Papas, The Tusculum Review, and For She is the Tree of Life: Grandmothers Through the Eyes of Women Writers. She teaches writing and literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
The message comes toward the end of a long Saint Joan run, my daughter’s final performance in the title role— when we get back late that night the light on our machine flashes like a Broadway Marquee and my brother on the other end says that I should return his call. He’s had a heart attack, in ICU with a complicating infection of the blood, and I dither the rest of the weekend about whether I should make the trip. In the end I decide to risk it, don’t change my plans to go in another month, betting he’ll live,…
The thin girl burns calories lifting hangers from the shopping rack, hungry as anyone for a bargain. She is not obsessed with her waist or the way her stomach laces her hips together like a rope bridge bent beneath the weight of the wind. The thin girl loves flowers. Find her in a meadow or at the bank, tucking a withdrawal slip in her wallet, in a coffee shop drinking chai, reading the poem about the scarecrow woman, feeling the deepest parts of herself swept up in a tornado of straw and chaff. The thin girl eats pancakes at the…