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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Review by Jane Ward Jen Michalski, award-winning author of 2021’s You’ll Be Fine, returns in June with All This Can Be True. Using alternating narratives, Michalski first explores the complex interior lives of two women as they take stock of their lives after tragedies, before finally weaving the two narratives into a rich story of love and motherhood, daring to live one’s true life, and the awakening of hope after heartbreak. Forty-something Lacie Johnson is on a flight with her husband, heading home after accompanying him on one of his many work trips. In the cross country solitude,…
Review by Emily Hall Miranda Schmidt’s debut novel Leafskin is slippery. Part prose, part poetry, the novel begins as a realistic portrayal of a woman struggling to conceive. The protagonist, Jo, is undergoing IVF treatments with Liam, her husband, while they simultaneously navigate deadly wildfires. As the novel progresses, however, the realism gives way to folklore. Jo reunites with her former lover, Ness, a rebellious artist who insists that she is a selkie, a shapeshifting creature that is part-human, part-seal. Eventually, when Jo conceives a child, she suspects that it, like Ness, will be a shapeshifter. Leafskin is…
Melody Wilson The Smell of Lambing —after a comment by Barbara Drake A friend says she’s nostalgic for lambing, for the smell she loves but will never experience again. I imagine lanolin, grass, the birth of kittens—a scent so narrow it tears from recognition. Inside becoming out. My daughter was born to a world of latex and soap. I bled for weeks. The flow contracted from tide to trickle, slowed to a keening thread, then quit. Kittens hadn’t prepared me. No one else was home, so I crouched under the desk as the tabby panted, licked under her tail until…
Submissions Are Open at MER 4/23 – 7/15! We are seeking poetry (1-3 poems), fiction and nonfiction (up to 1000 words) and art for a themed issue on Mothers and Family. Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around us. Family of heritage, family of birth, family of choice, our greater human family: our families can be sources of support, of exhaustion, of love, of pain. Our families can pass down to us lore or trauma. For MER 24, we are exploring poems that address our role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider…
Please join us! “Maiden, Mother, Crone: A Reading Celebrating 22 Years of MER – Mom Egg Review,” on Saturday, May 31, 2025, from 2-3 p.m. at the theater inside Cinema Salem.
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader Lisa C. Taylor’s novel The Shape of What Remains (Between the Lines Publishing/Liminal Press, 2025) is narrated by Teresa Calvano, a professor, wife, and mother whose second-born child was killed at the age of six. Her story opens ten years after the tragic accident. “I’m living, though my life for the last ten years has been more like the skin a snake sheds. The shape of the snake remains but there’s no substance.” (107) As her story spools out, Teresa—she’s also known as Terri and Tess, depending on the relationship—reveals her deep mourning; her…
MER Bookshelf – April 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Highley Alice B Fogel, Falsework, Bee Monk Press, August 2024, poetry These poems refuse sleep. They remind us that life is a cycle of filling and emptying, of finding and having and losing, and that even as hope dips out of sight like a loon, “love / in the end … might still exist.” Falsework, in construction, is a temporary but necessary form that allows what will become the lasting edifice to be built upon it, after which the support structure is disassembled and discarded. In these poems, a…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, the poet uses the metaphor of fungi to thread a masterful spell of poems that shimmer with dark energy, electricity, and transmutations as she explores childhood, family history, desire, and identity and writes her way toward both understanding and acceptance. Throughout, there’s a search for connection and a recognition of our own impermanence as the work of the natural world toils on with or without us. Poem titles provide a sense of the ride to come. There’s “Sex Talk,” “Dark Energy,” “An Underworld,” “Flammable Almanac,” “Family Tree” and…