Review by Rebecca Jane Incidental Pollen delivers wisdom relating to the experiences of being a nurse, the patients’ courage, and the vistas of grief, spanning verdant mystery to papery decay. These poems bare witness to the degradation of natural resources while also paying homage to bees, trees, nectar, pollen, imagination, and longing. Ellen Austin-Li’s debut collection contains narrative poetry that awakens the heart. Incidental Pollen has received recognition from Trio Award, Wisconsin Poetry Series, and Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. As the cofounder of Poetry Night at Sitwell’s in Cincinnati, Austin-Li also shows up as a poet who has a…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice In her most recent and Pulitzer-prize nominated collection, Bone Country, author Linda Nemec Foster takes readers on a breathless tour through Europe and especially her beloved Poland. Yet, these crystalline prose poems are no flaneur or tourist takes; they are attempts to grapple with belonging and boundaries, to reify the bridges to those who are bone-close, yet unreachable. In a collection whose title calls to mind Dickinson’s “Zero at the Bone,” Foster circles, approaches, and retreats, touching those places and people both vital and ultimately unknowable. Foster is the author of 14 collections of…
Review by Susan Michele Coronel “What a woman knows, she tells slant,” Alison Stone writes in her ninth book of poems, Informed (New York Quarterly Books, 2024). In this stellar collection, Stone employs a variety of traditional forms through a strong feminist lens, addressing themes of loss, time and memory, the struggles of childhood, adolescence and dysfunctional family life, as well as sex, politics, pop culture, the lives of famous women, and the pandemic. The book is divided into four sections. The first and last sections are devoted entirely to pantoums, the second to ghazals; the third is…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Lisa Marie Oliver, Birthroot, Glass Lyre Press, December 2024, poetry (chapbook) The poems in Birthroot explore themes of new motherhood, loss, renewal and the natural world. This chapbook follows the first months of pregnancy, through birth and toddlerhood—a time period that includes the loss of marriage, postpartum anxiety, wildfires, and family grief. Throughout the poems, the link between mother and child is revelatory, transformative and rooted in the natural world that surrounds them. Rebe Huntman, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, Monkfish Book Publishing, February 2025, creative…
Review by Melanie McGehee In her latest book, Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell, long-time educator and writer, finally tells her own story. Her prior books celebrate the lives of what might be considered ordinary working people. In them, she honors millworkers, farmers, and blacksmiths, particularly those of the post World War generations that she’s familiar with in North Carolina and Virginia. In Otherwise, I’m Fine, Presnell continues highlighting what is quite ordinary—ordinary, as in common—as she unpacks grief and family estrangement. When her father died in 1969, Barbara Presnell was fourteen years old. Her older sister was in high…
Review by Christy Lee Barnes In Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, an atheist’s prayers conjure up snakes and possums. Snakes, her deepest fear. And a possum, whose “deep blue / milk, lets her babies / cling to her opalescent / pelt warm and lunar.” I open with that image to give a glimpse into the wonderfully fierce strangeness of this collection. Again and again, the poems pull readers into a sharp, surprising, and ultimately beautiful world, past the ordinary and down to a weirder land full of honesty, pain, humor, and strength. In her concise, gripping…
Review by Lara Lillibridge A good poem is a fleeting emotion captured and held on a page, then released into the heart of the reader to linger. And as women and mothers, we need that pause in our day to escape our lives, our politics, our families and coworkers and just honor what it is be a mother: wounded, worried, strong and too often alone in our pain. But the poetry reminds us that we are not alone. We are connected to all the other mothers, whether we share their experiences or not. We relate. And Alyssa Sinclair’s Venus…
Review by Celia Jeffries “Throughout my journey of motherhood, there have been moments when I wanted to check out. That’s it. I’m done. These were moments when I was sleep-deprived, I was seeing stars behind the actual objects I was looking at.” (185) This admission comes late in Trinh’s book, after she has achieved everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. After she has taken the reader from her Buddhist upbringing through her travels to sacred sites around the world, her marriage and her struggle to combine motherhood with career and her sense that…
Review by Robbi Nester A first-generation child of immigrants must construct a hyphenated identity, intersection between two different worlds. Judy Kronenfeld’s memoir, Apartness (Inlandia, 2025) takes this process of acculturation as its subject, making the book’s hybrid form, a mixture of essays and poetry, particularly appropriate. Apartness’ blend of auto-biographical essays and poetry traces the writer’s “interaction […] with family, culture, institutions, time, and place” (13), from her youth in a tenement apartment in the Bronx to her adulthood as a writer, poet, and professor in Southern California. This hybridity offers readers a stereoscopic view of such subjects as…
Review by Jeanne Yu Nancy Miller Gomez’s dazzling debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects exposes the unsuspecting inconsolable objects we are born as and those we create in our human path as women and mothers. Gomez challenges boundaries, words push against the white spaces with meaning, in an exploration of what words can do in form, language and no-holds-barred images that invite our minds to wrestle with this culture that is inexplicably us. Her relentless artistic balance of musicality and rhythm plays against a backdrop of cognitive dissonance, creating visceral tension wound up and ready to explode. The collection begins…