Review by Moira Richards – The scent of summer clings to dampened soil; we long to turn it under, let the living nestle down beneath the leaf mulch, as we, inside our houses, turn on lamps against November, wait again for spring. And so ends the last poem in this collection – a collection of poems about a family and about love; a collection of love poems for family members present, and family members alive only inside warm houses of memory. In The Lives We Live in Houses, Pauletta Hansel burrows beneath the leaf mulch of daily life and draws…
Author: Mom Egg Review
When I come upstate in your third trimester, we take fetch-crazy Otis for a walk; the centimeter gained each week makes you the ball that O runs after. And I feel Ruby cause a quake along the equator of your globe-like belly. Like a misplaced library book as fines pile up, you are punishingly overdue. So for the next visit we take it easy, playing the games that will be set aside until Ruby becomes old enough not to swallow toxic Legos, tiny Tinker Toys, the small body parts from Operation. The phone call after I return home says that…
On Motherhood: A Literary Journal Explores and Inspires Review of Mom Egg, Spring 2012 by Renee Beauregard Lute Published in The Review Review http://thereviewreview.net/reviews/motherhood-literary-journal-explores-and-inspires Rating: Five Stars Keywords: Conventional (i.e. not experimental), Family focus, Theme issue, Women focus I have been a mother for nearly five weeks, now. It’s like being the queen of a country where I don’t know the language. It’s also the best thing ever. Ever. I wear pajama pants and breast milk all day, every day, and I can’t imagine anything better. As I type this review, tiny Madeline is in her bassinet next to me,…
My Face, My Face After so long I couldn’t decide whether it was age making me uglier or thick hair swamping my features so I drove 30 miles once, twice, three times to my hairdresser, but it wasn’t any better in the mirror— So I separated my coifed bangs pulled off the fraudulent streaks with my daughter’s tiny clips and found my face like my mother must have wanted— narrow brow, steely eyes lipsticked my broad mouth, as if it were art. Before Breasts I was happy, and slept all night long. Everyone loved me. I climbed like a…
Oblong in air catapulted into somersault You landed in arms ready to wash the blood from your journey. sniffing me furry without hair My voice no longer an echo. L. B. Williams is the author of the memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf, (Hamilton Books, 2005) www.letterstovirginiawoolf.com. Her work has appeared in such publications as Washington Square, The Mom Egg, The Image of Women, Mamas and Papas, The Tusculum Review, and For She is the Tree of Life: Grandmothers Through the Eyes of Women Writers. She teaches writing and literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
The message comes toward the end of a long Saint Joan run, my daughter’s final performance in the title role— when we get back late that night the light on our machine flashes like a Broadway Marquee and my brother on the other end says that I should return his call. He’s had a heart attack, in ICU with a complicating infection of the blood, and I dither the rest of the weekend about whether I should make the trip. In the end I decide to risk it, don’t change my plans to go in another month, betting he’ll live,…
The thin girl burns calories lifting hangers from the shopping rack, hungry as anyone for a bargain. She is not obsessed with her waist or the way her stomach laces her hips together like a rope bridge bent beneath the weight of the wind. The thin girl loves flowers. Find her in a meadow or at the bank, tucking a withdrawal slip in her wallet, in a coffee shop drinking chai, reading the poem about the scarecrow woman, feeling the deepest parts of herself swept up in a tornado of straw and chaff. The thin girl eats pancakes at the…
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack – The moment I finished reading Monica A. Hand’s me and Nina, I felt an intense longing to be with Nina Simone. I went to her official website, www.ninasimone.com to listen to her music just in time to hear her sing “I was hungry and it was your world” from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.” Suddenly that line I’ve heard dozens of times had new meaning, and it got me like a punch in the belly. It’s the pain of exclusion, the toxicity of racism, in Nina Simone’s lifetime and in ours (“How it…
Review by Nancy Vona – Donna Katzin has created a haunting and gripping book of poetry that focuses on South Africa, during and after apartheid. Katzin is executive director of Shared Interest, a not-for-profit organization that provides low-income black communities with capital and technical support for creating businesses. With a foreword by Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and an introduction by actor Danny Glover, this book has deservedly received attention by high-profile activists and humanitarians. It’s difficult not to stumble into hyperbole when describing With These Hands: poignant, heartbreaking, hopeful. But these poems are heartbreaking and hopeful. The first section of poems,…
Fishing without a fishing pole is feeling vibration and tug is like playing a harp with the fingers rather than the nails feel the strings as they tighten, loosen feel the nibble at the other end and tug on the hook, pull it through the flesh below the water’s surface you catch fish this way play soft strung instruments the guitar, the harp, the psaltery you can catch a love this way too playing the strings softly, amiably especially the invisible ones at wrist and knee sewn on by a mother long ago with care and determination. Odarka Polanskyj Stockert…