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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
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…