Review by Teresa Schartel Narey – In her debut poetry collection, Instructions for Preparing Your Skin, Ariana Nadia Nash unabashedly reveals how deeply personal experiences forever mark our bodies. The poems are honest and courageous; Nash makes wounds feel like badges of courage. Instructions for Preparing Your Skin was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2011 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. The book is divided into five sections, across which Nash takes the reader on interstate and international journeys in the quest for love, home, and, of course, the protection that comes from feeling comfortable in one’s…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader – In the twenty stories of Heather Tosteson’s Germs of Truth no one is left out. All told from a first-person viewpoint, they are populated with adopted children, reluctant mothers, lesbian couples, blended families, resentful sons and more. ‘More’ is also the title of the story ending the first section, which revolves around characters whose lives are touched in every way imaginable by their connections to sperm banks—not only the donors, the donees, their families and the children, but the workers as well. Most of the stories of the first section are rather short, though…
Review by Linda McCauley Freeman – There is one thing we all do, regardless of race, creed or color: we age. Since there’s no avoiding it, we might as well do it gracefully, thoughtfully, artfully. And so, editors Rycraft and What have created a collection of poems, essays, photos and cartoons on the female response to aging that presents us with a full spectrum of perspectives: the humor, the horror, the irony, the resistance and the resignation. By reading an anthology such as this we can stand shoulder to shoulder with others who are aging as we are, to have…
Review by Ann E. Michael – Poetry books offer the opportunity to travel, vicariously, to new environments. They also muster the reader out of her own perspective through the poet’s various chosen arts: syntax, imagery, rhythm, vocabulary, metaphor, and so on. Lois Marie Harrod’s latest collection cues the reader into the physical places the poems conjure, from Ringos New Jersey to the Great Barrier Reef; yet it strikes me that her work in this book deals less with regions and geographies than it does with internal places such as imagination and inter- and intrapersonal relationships. Harrod masters the strategy of…
My husband and I recently took Grace, who is seven, to see The Avengers. She had never seen a super hero movie before, and within two or three minutes, she was completely hooked. She reached her hands out to “touch” the shattered 3-D glass; she laughed at everything Iron Man said. And in the middle of one of the first battles, after sitting with her mouth hung open in amazement, she leaned over to me and patted me on the hand, and whispered as quietly as a seven year old can, “It’s OK, KK—the good guys always win in the…
I am a maker. Thoughts are words, words are the building materials. I hesitate to say bricks as they, the words, I mean, are as malleable as play-do, as changeable as water. I am, though, inert. My being is set, not as a feeling person. That changes with the hour although there are the usual preoccupations, but as a worker, I am inert. To clarify: the usual preoccupations are family, friends, world, in any order, and surviving childhood. The work is the work. My father called me every weekend morning, for years, to come and play baseball. Each time, for…
Hire the twelve year old from next door: Helen of Troy with azure eyes rimmed with black lashes. She loves kids, her mother says. She cuddles the two-year-old, Invites the five-year-old to build puzzles And ram cars against each other. Sneak upstairs to the office, the room with boxes and boxes of pagesandstacksofpoetryessaysunfinishednovels waiting to be unpacked, sorted, edited, sent to literary magazine limbo. The ergonomic chair invites perfect posture. Slouch anyway. Boxed manuscripts are Lucy’s wardrobe, Alice’s looking glass, and Dorothy’s cyclone all in one. Who needs Valium when there are words? Nancy Vona holds an M.A. in…
by Christine Orchanian Adler – Motherhood may be a universal experience, but it is a deeply personal journey for every woman. For some, it is seemingly effortless; for others, the challenges can be crushing. In her chapbook, Turning Cozy Dark, poet Jacqui Morton turns to the natural world to seek solace in the earth’s rhythms, hope in its continuous renewal and bridge the distance between her own ‘before’ and ‘after’ journey into motherhood. Morton lets readers know they are in deep from the very first poem, “Unimaginable Loss”: He came into the world like a psalm. Slowly, like the foamy…
Review by Lisa Cheby – As anyone who has experienced or witnessed mourning knows, the process of grieving is not linear, but indeed a whirlwind of anger, blindness, and, in rarer moments, stillness and clarity with a weight as palpable as the eye of a hurricane. Thus is the experience of reading Sharon Dolin’s Whirlwind, an account of life after a divorce in the shadow of infidelity. Dolin’s poems force the reader to pass through the flurry of emotions, through the bands of this hurricane of being wronged, abandoned, and transformed into someone stronger. In “To the Furies Who Visited…
I dream I walk through a desert of stone. It once took months for letters to reach their recipients; packages of supplies to pass foreign customers – worlds gone by. Bananas were posted to prevent scurvy and luck-charms embroidered slowly. Once, we had more time. I dream I walk through a desert of stone, and the ocean is rock, the solitary line of horizon also solidifying. It is my new job to be lighthouse keeper in this country. Having reason, the planet loses its immensity. Lovers survived colonisation, and shipments to distant lands. A message in a bottle travelled thirteen…