Review by Katie Kalisz Ellen Kombiyil’s second full-length collection, Love as Invasive Species, is dedicated at the beginning of Side A “for daughters” – as though daughters have it hardest, growing up through the inherited invasive love, deciding what to shed, what to keep, how to remember. The collection is a double book, with poems that “mirror and respond to each other.” There are two ways to read this book. When I first sat down with it, I read it “straight” through, beginning with Side A, getting to the end of that, which is the mid-point of the book,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
A Literary Reflection by Rosemary Starace As an adopted person myself, hopeful and concerned about how adoption is viewed by society, I was eager to delve into Marianne Novy’s new book—a careful, caring survey of 47 first-person stories from birth mothers, same-race and different-race adoptees, and adoptive parents. She finds “moving portrayals of grief, anger, courage, persistence, joy, learning, and forgiveness” and presents them in the hope that these real stories help readers understand “the complexity of emotions… [and] the complexity of social justice issues adoption can pose” (both 15). Novy, also an adoptee, is Professor Emerita of English…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Waking to Brevity is a testament to love, life, and how the poet and her husband came to terms with the encroachment of his Parkinson’s Disease. Sarah W. Bartlett has created a touching, brave, and ultimately inspiring collection of public and private moments, chronicling a relationship through early romance, building a family, and growing older and dependent. Her poems become a collective meditation on time and the precious aspects of the ephemeral. It is a most poignant journey, filled with gratitude even as grief settles in, for a shared life of devotion and memories. The…
Review by Lara Lillibridge The Presence of Absence: Kitchen table talks about parenting, leaving fundamentalism, and the very messy business of living with loss by Desiree Richter Desiree Richter is a musician, research instructor and dissertation consultant who believes that writing about loss honestly can help us heal. Her love for her children shines in The Presence of Absence, and her frankness about the eternal nature of loss is as refreshing as it is devastating. In the introduction, entitled, “Welcome to this Book!” Richter explains how this book came into existence. These kitchen table conversations began as a…
Review by Judy Kaber A scholar and a prolific writer, Claire Millikin’s ninth book of poetry, Magicicada (Unicorn Press, 2024), reflects her continuing feminist stance. In it she examines the fate of girls and young women who grow up voiceless and abused in a patriarchal society. Having been raised in the deep south, the song of periodical cicadas wove itself into Millikin’s consciousness and in this book of poems she uses the life cycle and the song of those cicadas as a vehicle to express the brutality of a young teen placed in isolation and her ultimate release. The…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Joan Kwon Glass’s first full-length collection of poems, Night Swim, was steeped in the grief of having lost to suicide first her young nephew, then her sister. This second collection, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, explores loss in broader terms—placing it in the context of geographical dislocation, political violence, and America’s own strange cruelties and dangers. With their (mainly) long lines and unadorned diction, these poems are accessible and compelling. Many start in familiar settings—Pizza Hut, the Barbie movie, the mall, a Big Boy restaurant—then zoom out into deeper considerations before returning us to an…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett In her debut chapbook, Nina Prater shares a series of simple pleasures, moments, and their simple lessons. Again and again and again. Often, when asked to assemble a collection of poems, I seek the story arc, progression or circle. This collection, by contrast, offers delicious sinking-in, encouraging and supporting in-the-moment lingering. An arc of sheer experience, as if walking alongside the poet through her day. And really, how could one miss this intent, with the wonderful book-end poems of “The Drive to Work” and “Acceptance”? In the former, right out of the gate, we…
For an upcoming online folio themed “Mother/Writer-Artist” we seek unpublished poems (up to 2 in one document), short fiction or prose (to 750 words) related to the conflicts and confluences, inspirations, and other facets of these two worlds. Submissions will be via Google form. Submissions will open 11/1 and close 11/11. SUBMIT TO “MOTHER/WRITER” FOLIO
Doralee Brooks Hips —After Lucille Clifton/Patricia Smith My hips hold me on weak knees and unsteady ankles as I pull spiky weeds like needles from the side of the house wearing Michael’s leather work gloves. He tells me to spray and wait, but I don’t have patience. I used to brace Janine on the left hip and take her older brother by the hand many mornings when we walked a block to the sitter’s house. Hips girdled and stockinged, I’d speed down a steep cobble-stoned street past Crescent Elementary, hop the 88 Frankstown, transfer to the Hill, arrive an…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Upcoming and new books on our radar! Megan Merchant, Hortensia, in Winter, New American Press, October 2024, poetry Hortensia, in Winter, winner of the New American Poetry Prize, is a series of prose poems addressed to an ancestor who travelled with Joseph Smith to help establish Nauvoo, IL, then left everything she knew and loved when Brigham Young came into power and instituted polygamy. These poems span motherhood, desire, spirituality, and what it means to take agency of your own life. Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, Kelsay Books, August…