Review by Mary Ellen Talley In much of the world, the summer heat of 2026 has been oppressive, pressing down like an ugly metaphor. How can we cope? First, it helps to identify the challenges. Doubly wonderful when a poet such as Judith Skillman takes the lead to explore varied forms of oppression. Her most recent poetry collection, OPPRESSION, gathers history, mythology, Jewish ancestors, family matters, and her own experiences to create moving free verse poems. This Northwest poet sets the scene in section one, “For Darkness.” She creates images of sewing, weaving, and fabric in the poem, “Penelope’s…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carole Mertz Despite its many comic touches, I found Grace Before the Fall to be a serious book with a serious message. Its provenance is quite interesting: Lipschultz began the novel over forty years ago, but it did not reach the wider public until 2025. Lipschultz had been a student of John Irving, who first read the manuscript in 1982 and who promotes the work in the book’s foreword. Members of her dissertation committee at Ohio University furthered the novel along its way; later revised forms of the work became a one-woman show at New York’s New…
Review by Melissa Kutsche Tara Lynn Masih is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her YA novel, My Real Name is Hanna, won the Florida Book Award for YA literature, and she has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. In her debut historical fiction novel, The Silent Women, Masih gives readers a glimpse of the physical, psychological, and emotional burdens carried by women in World War II, and what happens when those burdens threaten the fragile bonds between friends, family, communities, and lovers. After the Black Sunday dust storms of 1935 push the Holloway family to…
Review by Tessara Dudley Women In Marigold is a book of poems that explore the smallest moments of life with lush imagery and evocative metaphor. This collection is playful and serious by turns, but earnest and real throughout. Each poem both stands alone and links to those around it. Taken together, they reveal the many quiet stories of everyday life. The poems in this collection are arranged into three sections. The first ruminates on locations—physical and metaphorical—and what makes a home. “PERMIT YOURSELF ANGER” points to the limbo of diaspora: “They won’t go back but they want Nepal /…
Review by Rebecca Jane Continental Drift maps humanity’s kinship with a teeming variety of psycho-social natural geology. A “Field Trip” lyric considers “what rays gild a heron’s thoughts?” (10) and “what green itches each new earth in winter’s wake” (11)? These poems reveal the wordless connection between human experience and land, sea, sky, geological time, tectonic touch and glide. Beyond that, these poems witness the human dramas of war, refuge, and rebuilding from the perspective of stone, grass, muddy water, and salty shore. We may know traumas that force people to scatter, drift, and wash up somehow still alive…
Sleep When the Baby Sleeps and Other Nonsensical Writing Advice by Pichchenda Bao A renowned poet once gently suggested to me that I would never find the perfect conditions to write so I shouldn’t let that hold me back. I think about that advice often. I know there are writers who fill up the backs of receipts, napkins, prescription pads, the notebook app on their phones, who scribble sitting on the sidelines of playing fields, at the playground, on the subway, who wake up early or stay up late to take advantage of the quiet to write things down,…
Jimmy’s Revival –from a work-in-progress by Lyndsey Ellis Sugar called the day after my trial visit with Jimmy at the Revival Complex. As usual, she wore her granny hat for the first half hour, buttering me with small talk, like Eudal’s fickle weather and what she was baking for her neighbors. I didn’t mind since she’d caught me at the laundromat, desperate to pass time while my clothes dried. I used the glass door of my dryer as a mirror to pluck rogue gray hairs from my afro while Sugar caught me up on the lives of…
Rita Kelley Hard Head For twenty years, Rita Kelley has been developing a unique voice drawn from her memories, intuition, and imagination. Her themes center on family, connection, home, and nature, and in recent years, her process has moved into creating a dreamlike quality and figurative abstraction through collage. She has illustrated two poetry chapbooks with Feral Press, designed cover art, and has appeared in the annual Women Artists Datebook (Syracuse Cultural Workers.) She exhibited at the Manchester Connecticut Workspace Out of Many Art Exhibit, celebrating Caribbean Culture (2025) and in 2026 received an honorable mention…
The Far Side of the Moon is Another Form of Absence –after Luisa A. Igloria by Lorraine Rice Mostly I return the cold shoulder with a coiled tongue of distrust. I want to believe without the burden of proof but fear faith is for hairless, mewling animals all a-huddle, warm bodies pressed one to another in a woven bowl of dried grass and plastic strips, certain of return, the mushed up worm. I once tried feeding my baby this way, chewing what she couldn’t, breaking braids of meat to mash, then passing the pulp, nutrients…
In the Beginning by Z.M. Spalter Sleep when the baby sleeps, lay him on his back, no, lay her on her belly, but only if you are in the same room. Read books about sleep, as if you haven’t been sleeping, every single day of your entire life, since the day you were born, all without giving it much thought. Wonder if you should hire a sleep consultant. Sleep with baby beside you, not down the hall, and never, not ever, on the couch, but also not in the same bed as you, unless you decide to, but only…