Life begins in water. Here, on the gravel beach, where the shifting tides rock clattering pebbles forward and back in their arms, and the murmuring sea whispers lullabies in our ears, I watched you. You were silver and grey like the sea. Stooped over. One hand curving sideways, shucking smooth skittering pebbles out to sea. The cliff’s arms encircled us. We ambled together, embraced, then pulled apart. Solid to liquid. I walked with my head bent downwards, scanning the gravelled earth for a mottled rock shot with rust, or a limpet shell, curved like a pregnant belly and all the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
I have lost twenty-four pounds. Most of it seemingly from my breasts. “They are like teenage breasts,” my husband says. He quickly adds, “That’s a compliment.” I have my doubts. Why do the breasts go before the potbelly? Yet that, too, has shrunk. I pull on my old jeans and look down at myself with amazement. Where did I go? Where did my new-mother-full-blooming-woman-body go? Am I a girl again? Someone at work says, “You dropped a lot of weight!” I resist an impulse to look around my feet for something fallen. Where have I dropped it? Where has fifteen…
Reviewed by Carol Dorf – Although it is “difficult to get the news from poems” Amy King’s poetry helps the reader notice and pay attention to what is essential. Her poetry juxtaposes disparate aspects of personal history, social context and language providing the reader with more complex understandings of our lives. The second poem in I Want to Make You Safe, “Follow the Leader of my Silken Teeth,” provides the reader with an understanding of King’s ars poetica, while referring to the art of Janet Cardiff. The poem begins, “And suddenly, art is a hand planted from the wrist/down into…
The Mom Egg at Mass PoFest THE MOM EGG AT MASSACHUSETTS POETRY FESTIVAL Saturday, April 21st, 1:30-2:30 PM at The Gathering, Salem, MA Featured Readers: MARIE GAUTHIER, JENNIFER JEAN, COLLEEN MICHAELS , JANUARY GILL O’NEIL, NANCY VONA, MC –MARJORIE TESSER Click to reserve your spot http://masspoetry2012.crowdvine.com/talks/25462 Saturday, April 21, 2012
The language of motherhood isn’t equipped with words to express and the lack of control one feels about having a sick child. When I think of Homer’s poem – each island rising up from the flat surface of the page, like paper mache islands decorated with paint and sequins – the landscape of that journey is so real I can touch it. My son Max and I were shipwrecked together for 2 ½ years on a succession of islands where we met whatever monsters fate could dream up. From the moment he was born, his breath came in thin, rattling…
The Mom Egg 2012 Launch Party & Reading The Mom Egg Spring Reading & Launch Party Celebrating the release of The Mom Egg 2012 Vol. 10 THE BODY Contributors will read from the new issue. Sunday, April 15th 6-8 p.m. Cornelia Street Cafe 29 Cornelia Street NYC 212-989-9319 $7 admission includes food or drink credit Sunday, April 15, 2012
Hand tempera paintings of New York City sewer systems, an unripe plum, mass of potential cells, bundled and bursting to expand, mitosis ready, to form organs and limbs. Paintings of flowers, and empty soil beds swollen breasts, remembering peri-bottles, the chill white tile, exposed pipes and gray grout, I wrap it in toilet tissue, set it on the tub edge sensing an importance, but then worry someone might stop by and need to use the bathroom, or Yosef, before I tell him, I put it in the bowl and flush. Lost. And a sliver of skin sent for chromosome testing…
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack – When I was pregnant with my first son, I told a friend who is from Ghana that I was dreaming every night about food. There were fine restaurants where I would order extravagant meals, or visit caves lined with chocolate walls. She held my hands with tears in her eyes—in her culture food dreams meant hunger. I was hungry, but not for food. I craved mindfulness, living inside my body, inside a lush inner landscape which was both mine and not mine. The chocolate cave walls had messages in an ancient language I longed to…
Review by J.P. Howard – Karma’s Footsteps, published by flipped eye publishing (www.flippedeye.net) in 2011, is Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s debut collection of poetry. Tallie successfully draws the reader in from the very first poem. The first stanza of the first poem, “Her Voice” (For Dr. Nina Simone), is a powerful mix of visuals, sounds and words placed lovingly and deliberately on the page: bowl of crushed blueberries, knife edge, cracked calabash, heavy truth, ancient wine and renegade bones, rise up white wings of doves, tapestry of nerve, daughter of well-aimed lightning “Her Voice” is a poem-song, a loving tribute to…
Review by Maria Scala – The cover of Cassie Premo Steele’s latest collection of poetry, The Pomegranate Papers, bears the image of a succulent red pomegranate bursting through and staining a page of text from the dictionary. This is an apt way to describe the central theme of this wise and thoughtful collection – motherhood and creativity. One often bleeds into the other, and sometimes with great force. Throughout the book, Premo Steele depicts worlds that both mingle and collide. Early on, in “Walking on the Backs of Whales”, she vividly describes a dream she has the night of her…