Review by Laura Dennis I love novels for the vast landscapes they traverse, the many shades of human experience they evoke. Although short fiction elicits pleasure on a different scale, every so often I encounter a story collection that offers both closely observed situations and a wide-ranging emotional exploration. Sara Hosey’s recently released Dirty Suburbia: Stories is one such book. As I read, I often felt I had either known or been some version of Hosey’s female characters. I frequently wanted to cringe, even as I admired the author’s skill in depicting ordinary women’s lives. The protagonists are not…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jessica Manack “It was when spring felt real. As if/it would stick around for a while (59).” In her fifth collection, Oblivescence, or “the act of forgetting,” accomplished poet Kelly R. Samuels takes the reader on the journey of losing a parent to Alzheimer’s disease. Through a maze of medical terms sounding like sinister foes, like anomia and alexithymia, Samuels aims to understand her mother’s condition, to ease her discomfort, although the emotional blows that occur on the journey of being a caretaker to a memory loss patient come without warning, without preparation. Taking the reader on…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Lately, I’ve been obsessed with groups of three: triads, tercets, triplets. There is a wyrd sisterhood about the number, mystical and yet as sturdy as a wooden stool. Thomas De Quincey, in his book of essays, Suspiria De Profundis, writes, “and they are three in number, as in the Graces . . . the Parcae . . . the Furies . . . even the Muses.” So when I read Jane Satterfield’s masterful collection, The Badass Brontës, I was smitten. In “Gigan for a Pandemic Winter,” Satterfield writes, Once three sisters watched the world turn…
Praise Poems and the Poets Who Write Them MER Online Folio with Bonus Poetry Prompts Curated by JP Howard
Review by Sharon Tracey Emily Hockaday’s poetry collection, In a Body, is a study in shape-shifting and an exploration of the intimate relationship between the body and pain as a mother, daughter, and partner. The presence of pain hovers over her motherhood: chronic and like a child tugging on a shirt for attention, always there. She notices and observes, acknowledges and wonders as she makes meaning and connects her own pain to the suffering she sees in the natural world. Along the way, she deftly threads the language and mystery of science within the poems, informing and enriching them.…
Praise poems and the poets who write them, plus two writing prompts A Folio Curated by JP Howard I love writing praise poems and teaching others how to write praise poems. Praise poems let us acknowledge all the complicated and unique parts of ourselves, while also celebrating the joys in our lives. Praise poems allow a writer to show up on the page or stage, share loss, joy, sadness, and heartbreak, while ultimately celebrating that the writer/poet is still here, still writing, still finding praise-worthy parts of one’s lives to share. This folio showcases the fabulous praise poems of seven…
KC Trommer Up So often I think of everything I cannot tell you, everything that will not translate across time. If there is a camera, let it catch us, so you may see something of this story that you are in when you are outside of it. Let whatever it catches show you how you were loved, a still of you, pulled up onto my lap, laughing. In raising you, I track back. Over my shoulder, I see the whole country behind me as I beat out a new path. My mother tells me about when they’d all…
B. Fulton Jennes Wake Up on Wednesday, Sober sip seltzer water at a party, sober let the dog sniff every tree trunk, sober park between two lines without closing one eye, sober wave to neighbors at their mailboxes, sober climb the stairs into church, sober pass the liquor store without looking in, sober pay the taxes on time, sober tip the server who forgot my water, sober feel fear and not need to douse it, sober look into my eyes in the mirror, sober sleep a full night, dream of flying, sober donate my mother’s clothes to Good Will,…
Elizabeth Lara Kitchen Gadgets Praise the kitchen where the gadgets wait in mute competition, where I stand looking out the window over white peace lily blooms and snake plant spikes, where out of the corner of my eye I catch the philodendron stretching yet another tentacle through the open porch window, green against the yellow of my kitchen wall already dotted with faint tracks of prior invading shoots; praise its tenacity. Praise the neighbors’ houses, distant white behind black November tree trunks, his flying flag, their blue front door, their stories I imagine while the blender growls a bellyful…
Peggy Robles-Alvarado Ode To The Necessary Distance Between Us: A Contrapuntal DISCLAIMER PERFORMED AS INTERNAL MONOLOGUE BEFORE SHARING POEMS ABOUT MY MOTHER: An experiment in giving myself permission disclaimer.this is a disclaimer.here.i came to declamar.declaim.make claims for and against my mother also known as Mami who doesn’t want me to call her by her name.disclaimer.this i claim.i make claims.i have no physical receipts.i am the receipt.i am the product.i am the proof.i am Mami’s historian.Mami is my mythology.and yes as a poet, i doubt the validity of my memory.i am meta.Mami is the matter.the prey.i am…