Poems Curated by J.P. Howard We are women writers, many of us are members of Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon(WWBPS) or long-time supporters of the Salon. We are diverse and multi-generational; many of us are women of color and a number of us are LGBTQ writers. We are community. Writing is a bond we share, sometimes the act of writing our truths saves our lives. We are all daughters, many of us are mothers, some of us are nurturers and our stories are sometimes complicated, often painful, but always necessary. SAY/MIRROR, my debut collection of poetry, published…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Author’s Note by Dana Bowman – It took a wedding, two babies, and a funeral to help me understand that I needed to get sober. How I survive parenting while in recovery is another story (xi). BOTTLED: A MOM’S GUIDE TO EARLY RECOVERY is my sincere and often hilarious memoir that travels with me through the pain of addiction to alcohol, and my recovery, all with small children in tow. Some would say getting sober while parenting two boys under two years of age is impossible. I would not only argue that, but offer the hope that, yes,…
Review by Margaret Fieland – This is a book comprised largely of letters addressed “Dear Continuum”, directed to emerging poets who will carry on the work of poetry and social activism. It contains six sections: an introduction, the nineteen letters, two essays, one about being a mother and the other about the death of poet Amiri Baraka, Notes, References, and Gratitude. The letters are addressed to younger poets about author Mariahdessa Ekere Tallie’s approach to writing, about what writing means to her, about the place of poetry in the world and in her life, about creativity and what she does…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett Come out here. So I dried my hands. This opening of the first poem stopped me in my tracks with the breath-holding immediacy of this familiar phrase, even as it compelled me into the poem. And into the book, this introductory moment, or ‘Interlude,’ being a portent of moments to come. What existed in a blink between two people now exists for the rest of us forever. Not only because the poet took the time to write it down, but more, because she took the time to allow the experience in the first place. Such…
Review by Carole Mertz – Nora Hall lived from 1843 to 1928. There is so much to appreciate in the letters she wrote to her absent son in California from 1909 to 1911. At the time, Nora lives in Port Allegany with her husband who operates a lumber mill. Writing to her son Howard, she conveys in her homespun language how much she misses him. She provides us, her readers of more than a century later, the sense of the rhythm of her days and of what life was like in her local community. But the most important element is…
How many years since mystery disappearance –who knows? in the basement his things his hurt glance with twinkle of defiance –coming off in charge “As far as we knew you were dead!” kilter of his belongings stored in the laundry room We go on a picnic to Redbrush and there he is living on nuts and berries He runs at us shouting gibberish his long dirty nails deployed to heighten the scare The children are not amused I manage to coax him with a swig of water and an energy bar His mother gets him shackled and in the van…
My body would not give you up. An iris slow to open at the center of me, softened only by hours, in the rush of waters narrowed again and in the end, on the third day, had to be held open for you. You must understand if at night I press my face to your chest, hold a small foot in each of my hands. My body aches sometimes for the wing-flutters, the swollen rolls, the second pulse it knew when it held both of us. Karen Pojmann is a writer and editor. She has worked mostly in magazine journalism…
There is a tilt to the world a lilt to the world when I think of her the imagined daughter I might just have one day a delight ringed by a thousand sadnesses of losses I imagine for it is only losses I know of mothers and daughters divisions and divides in flesh so alike they can not stay separate there is a lilt a tilt to the world when I think of my mother the imagined one I might just have one day bodies more alike than the great divide would suggest. Dareth Ann Goettemoeller is a fine…
If the football captain moves to the forest, will the cheerleader still gain weight? If you hate high school, is it easier to adjust to adult life? Do you give your kids advice or do you figure times have changed? How did I even live this long? My mother complained about being in her fifties, but she should have said something about the forties. The forties are something for you too, aren’t they? Except you—you look exactly the same. (Some time describing the—okay, let’s just say it: boy toy—who came on the tour of the new wing. Lisa wanted to…