You came when a woman is usually past the messiness of a child with all its evolutionary prized self-centeredness and demand. You came and introduced fear into a life If not well lived, lived with adventure, risk; attempted without regret. You brilliantly exposed remorse for time squandered in search of tangible achievement and the wait for rightness – Right partner, right career, right security, right place. Time expired. Then, later, you presented bringing a second vicarious chance. Ambivalence when you were a thought, But the instant you slipped fast after 72 hours from your first knock, (Portent of nature revealed…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Nancy Gerber – When I opened Me First, a collection of poems by Ann Curran, I found two pages of “testimonials” from historically important artists, writers, industrialists, and even Jesus Christ, who has this to say: “Don’t blame me. I just gave her the talent. Never told her what to do with it. However, I’m glad I made the cut.” And this from James Joyce: “I think Me First could have been a little more obscure . . . . But sometimes it made me LOL.” The commentary left me laughing and also a little confused: what kind…
Review by Lisa Cheby – Good poetry, like a good sermon, finds a balance between wisdom and humility, between insight and struggle, to bring the painful into the light so we can see its beauty. Iris Jamahl Dunkle is not afraid of getting dirty; not kinky dirty, but a kind of digging in the garden dirty, of excavating our emotional skeletons and roots dirty: “Dig and dig until all the bones are found” (70). In her Trio Award Winning book Gold Passage, Dunkle serves up the roots and bones negotiating how to be human in organic forms that leave her…
You would see she exists in defined space composed of small detail: apples, thread, car keys, what’s for dinner Wednesday. If she could move from thread and grocery lists to questions of destiny, love, death— but life interrupts in the opposite direction, insists upon the particular in the shape of her daughter wandering in wondering where her boots are, of the non-negotiable need to finish errands before the school bus arrives. So we are delivered to comedy. “Mrs. B. gave up trying to fathom the ways of fate and fortune and focused instead on the refrigerator’s innards, which had been…
Review by Cathy Warner – As an infant my oldest daughter loved being cuddled and entertained by aunts and grandparents, but she cried for days after their visits. She threw her first tantrum at 18 months and continued, almost daily, until she was in fourth grade, when I, at my wit’s end, sought professional help. My daughter had an auditory processing disorder and dyslexia. Knowing what was really going on in her brain helped me to stop being angry at her, to stop thinking I was a bad mother, and most importantly, to heal our relationship. My daughter is 26…
My name is winter hanging on the hem of spring A mandarin red My mother’s name is long road blues A scattered red My father’s name is twisted psalm A gospel / not red I come from a shouting / called people Remember me My name is burnt leaf curled dish water gossip A clownfish orange My mother’s name is halo stained glass A melted pottery glaze orange My father’s name is aperture lost breath A blue cry flamed orange I come from a distilled / leather-skinned people Remember me My name is scream-choking chicken A wildflower yarrow My mother’s…
Review by Ivy Rutledge Laura Grace Weldon’s poetry collection, Tending, tells the story of a life deeply felt. Read from beginning to end, the poems collectively form a larger poem detailing images of farm life, domesticity, family life, and beyond. Setting the tone for the collection, her opening poem, “Out of Body,” articulates a child’s sense of empathy, using carefully composed images of bodies, weight, and movement. She writes, “I worked to stay in the small body/my being was given,” then slips out of that embodiment, working her way through a series of expanding scenes. She sees “people hauling heavy…
Review by Libby Maxey – I love the concept of four chapbooks published in one volume, four poets brought together in a conversation that only the reader can hear. Apparently, this kind of “quartet” is a specialty of Toadlily Press, and Mend and Hone (2013) is the latest in the series. When I began to read it, I expected to find myself listening for the substance of the conversation, but the greatest pleasure turned out to be the sound of the different voices—and they are very different. These poets, all female, do share common concerns, concerns common to most of…
Review by Dallas Woodburn – It is safe to say I have never before read a book quite like Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough, winner of the American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. During the first few pages of the book, I found the analysis-heavy part of my brain kept interrupting, trying to pin down the book into a definable category: was this fiction? Poetry? A novel-in-stories? But this is a book that resists labels. It does not fit into tidy boxes. And, I grew to realize more and more as I continued reading, that is part of what…
Review by Nancy Vona – The best books can be enjoyed over and over again. Kyle Potvin’s chapbook Sound Travels on Water is one such book: a satisfying collection of poems with nuances of meaning that emerge on subsequent readings. Potvin writes about ordinary moments: cooking soup, rocking a three year old to sleep, eating burnt toast, a high school reunion. Even washing laundry! Her everyday subject matter becomes remarkable and illuminating with her expert grasp of poetic forms and the elements of poetry. She is a mother, and her poems capture ordinary scenes of motherhood with grace and tenderness. Consider…