Let me be the calm, let this be the place, let this be the center, eye of the storm, let it swirl all around outside of here. Here is the garden maples, redbuds, and oak trees shade you wrens, sparrows, and cardinals sing to you scents of the blooming roses, basil, oregano, the damp earth itself fill your head fill you with peace Let me be the calm Let this be the place Right here Carol Brown is living in Columbia, MO. She is the mother of two teenagers. She is also a writer, a fiber artist, and a…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Autumn Renga R. Erica Doyle, Monica A. Hand, Yona Harvey, Cherise A. Pollard, Kate Rushin Searched for shooting stars found silence in The Milky Way harvest home. (Kate) Blue moon is not blue it’s white just like all the other moons. (Monica) Like the ancients, I navigate constellations your visage, my sky. (Erica) Stars pulse desire into the cosmos, night winds cool our Autumn heat (Cherise) wood fire warms the room flames light nearby photographs distant relatives. (Yona) Calls, cards, old hymns keep us close: prayers in the season of night. (Kate) Orion will rise: thousands of blackbirds gather…
Autumn Renga R.Erica Doyle Monica A. Hand Yona Harvey Cherise A. Pollard Kate Rushin Poets’ Group Selections Carol Brown – Refuge Ann Marie Gamble – Somewhere Near the Punch Bowl at the 30-Year Class Reuniom Dareth Ann Goettemoeller – When I Think of Her Karen Pojmann – Umbilicus Elizabeth Ann Rieman – Lil’ Strife “The Poets’ Group is an informal (until we agree on the T-shirt design) group of women who meet sporadically (every three weeks) to write and read what we’ve written. Our various work lives (and writing itself) can be isolated endeavors, and our group provides collegiality and…
– WITH ANIMAL is a collaborative book of short stories, written by Kelly Magee and Carol Guess, that imagines the implications of humans who become pregnant with animals. Pregnancy and childbirth are times when surreal and sometimes unexplainable things really do happen, so it was a natural extension to take these stories into the realm of magical realism. It’s pretty common, for example, for women’s hair to get thicker during pregnancy, so if she was pregnant with a sheep, it seemed to follow that she’d grow fur; women crave specific and sometimes odd foods during pregnancy, so if a woman…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn …From her mother dimension /high among the fluorescent lights, she // coached me through the solar system of house, / over thresholds into the galaxy of backyard, / through the gate into the universe of town and beyond. (“The Grip” 88) Before I launch into a review that shamelessly lauds Jim Peterson’s writing, it is only fair that I disclose how well I know both the man and his poetry. We met in 2001 when I was an undergraduate at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. I was a “mature student” about to declare as a Political Science major…
Reviewed by RZ Wiggins Anyone who has been in a cross-cultural relationship will empathize with the frequent cultural misunderstandings and the awkwardness of family and friends who don’t speak the same language that are prominent in Tracy Slater’s memoir. The book is testament that such obstacles can be overcome. Slater meets her husband-to-be, Toru, when in her late thirties, an independent, Ph.D. professional. Reluctant to relocate from her native Boston, she declares herself “bicontinental,” maintains her apartment, commutes to her job teaching MBAs to write, and develops a literary series sited in Boston and Tokyo. Japanese can be reserved towards…
Review by Ivy Rutledge – In The Beginning Things, Bunny Goodjohn* pulled me right into the world of Willowswitch Lane, where twelve-year-old Tot Thompson has been displaced from her home and into the bedroom of Gareth Strand. There, on his sailboat-printed sheets, Gareth “fed her lines and she ate them like candy,” and Tot dreams that their secret moments are solid love (57). Goodjohn knits into this narrative the stories of Elaine, a woman abandoned by her husband and left to raise Tot and her fifteen-year-old sister Dorothy, and Dan, Elaine’s father-in-law, who has just lost his wife. Dan…
Review by Nancy Gerber Grief is heavier than concrete. A mother’s grief is fierce, dark and insatiable as the pit of hell. That’s what I learned from Vanilla Milk, Chanel Brenner’s new memoir in poems about the death of her six year old son, Riley, from a ruptured AVM (arteriovenous malformation, a tangle of abnormal blood vessels) in his brain. The night Riley died, Brenner sat down at the computer and wrote a poem.And kept on writing poems. When she went to the supermarket. When someone asked her how many children she had. When Geoffrey the Giraffe from Toys ‘R’…
Review by Libby Maxey Some poetry begs to be understood; some challenges the reader to understand. Then there’s the poetry that doesn’t ask us for anything; it seems complete in itself, regardless of what we understand. In general, Emily Wolahan’s Hinge fits into the latter category. Understanding is an open question and an important one, recurring throughout the book, but Wolahan knows better than to make things clear when they aren’t. Her poems aren’t the prosaic kind that tell vivid stories or create defined characters; even the images can be elusive, and moments of jumbled grammar can leave the reader…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn Some of the fictions you will read here are full-fledged stories, including the smallest one, at 27 words….But empowered by their smallness, to be fictions all they need to do is lie. (Robert Olen Butler “A Small Introduction” xiii) Who could not be intrigued by a slim volume of bite-sized lies? These stories, selected by Tara L. Masih and her team, were nominated by a combination of journal editors, publishers, and two “roving editors” who hunted down gems that might otherwise have been overlooked. The result is THE BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2015, a gorgeous object in…