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Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carol Dorf Broken Narrative in Shira Dentz’ door of thin skins – At seventeen, my daughter and her friends call older men, by which they mean those past college age, who are interested in them, pedophiles. The middle-aged male narrative of nubile young thing with interest in older men certainly doesn’t seem to have anything to say to these young women. In door of thin skins, Shira Dentz uses a combination of prose, erasure and visual poetry to tell the story of psychologist in his sixties who sexually abuses his college-aged client. The variety of techniques Dentz employs…
Review by Nancy Gerber – It’s a pleasure to dive into Robyn Hunt’s debut poetry collection, The Shape of Caught Water. In rhythmic, evocative language, these poems chart the rising swells and quiet pools of human relationships. A young girl mourns the break-up of her parents’ marriage as she observes her father falling for another woman. Parents experience the eerie emptiness that descends when a child leaves home. A couple argue on New Year’s Eve, their explosive words echoed by midnight fireworks. A group of women gather for a writers’ retreat, the richness of their friendship reflected in the food…
Author’s Note: Kelly Ann Jacobson on Cairo in White What I Know about Birth – In creative writing classes, we are often told, “write what you know.” I amend that in my own writing to “write something inspired by what you know,” with an emotional truth that resonates but without the messy attempt to reconcile an actual experience with a created one. Zahra, the Egyptian mother character in my novel, is much different than me, but experiences many of the same experiences I did while engaged to an Egyptian and visiting his family in Cairo for eight days. Zahra also experiences…
We recently completed the process of responding to submissions for the upcoming issue of Mom Egg Review. This is always tough. We are all writers; we know how unpleasant it is to receive a “decline” response. So why do pieces get declined? Of course, there are always some that do not adhere to our guidelines: they are not by or about mothers or mothering, they have excessive word count, they have been published before. There are some pieces that, while heartfelt, are not as skillfully done as others. But the vast majority of submissions we receive are pertinent and well…
Review by Jennifer Martelli – In “Wreck Things,” Jennifer Jean writes: ….My first step on water was for balance– my arms arced, clutching after the folds of those notes. The second step, for fright, caught me fast– divided between two surfaces. This seemed wrong so I tiptoed following the paper’s flux for a few yards, scooping it up when the wind was lazy. Here we have the poet balancing on Pier 42 on the Pacific Ocean–about as far west on the continent as you could go without falling off–desperately trying to grasp an “incomprehensible/villanelle conception or a grocery list” let…
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack – I may not be the best person to equate marriage to a sonnet, but I feel it nonetheless, in Amy Dryansky’s generous and lovely book, Grass Whistle. The speaker is rooted in a traditional family and a long marriage, with many references to children and a husband. This isn’t a volume of formal poems but Dryansky stays within the sonnet-like emotional structure of her persona as wife/mother/daughter. Within it she soars with the freedom afforded to accomplished poets. The speaker dutifully does what is prescribed by her traditional roles but the poems aren’t circumscribed. This…
Review by Emily R. Blumenfeld – Through 48 poems interlinked with photographic “image poems” and “documentations”, Amy Sara Carroll locates her experience of motherhood simultaneously in private and public space. Fannie + Freddie/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography is infused with both maternal love and juxtapositions of the relational closeness of intimacy, sexualities, and parenting with the inequalities and exploitation in the social, political, and ecological landscapes that frame the privacy of family. Carroll consistently offers a lyric poetry of contemporary social reality told in an intimate personal voice. The text’s structure echoes a parallel process to the links between private…
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Author’s Note: Margie Shaheed on Mosaic – “These are the poems of a storyteller clearly connected to her African ancestry, oral tradition, and the history of Black people in America.” Dr. Mary E. Weems, Ohioana Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2013 Mosaic is a chapbook of storytelling poems. I learned the art of storytelling from my mother who was privately a poet. She told the best stories and she wrote poetry always careful with details and she had impeccable timing. I naturally bring this element into my work because I believe /we are poem with story to tell/. I see poetry as a…