Review by Michelle Panik In Shutta Crum’s latest chapbook, The Way to the River, readers embark on an exploration of struggle and suffering, beauty and triumph, which asks them to consider how a journey can shape a person, and how a person can shape their journeys. The chapbook is organized into seven sections—each one a different leg of a journey. As someone who’s in the middle of planning my family’s summer vacation, I eagerly dove in—if not for travel tips, then to at least feed off the electric, kinetic energy of travel. The first section, “Why Poetry,” is a meditation…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Forest Reverie: A Review by Suzette Bishop of Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw The New England forest surrounds us, lives in us, in Whipsaw by Cuban-American poet and essayist, Suzanne Frischkorn. This is her newest poetry collection just out from Anhinga Press. Her previous poetry collections include Fixed Star, named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, Girl on a Bridge, and Lit Windowpane, as well as five chapbooks. Reading Whipsaw, the forest I played in as a child rushed right back to me: the sounds, scents, light. But the poems also show me how to re-see it…
Review by Diane Gottlieb What would you do if your young son’s night terrors have begun to spill into his daytime hours? If your own childhood was fraught, leaving you with few positive parenting models to draw from? If your husband was not taking your son’s struggles seriously? These are just some of the challenges facing Eve, one of two protagonists in Ellen Birkett Morris’s deeply engaging novel Beware the Tall Grass, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. The other of the novel’s main characters is a sensitive young man named Thomas, whose story takes…
Review by Jessica Manack Kari Gunter-Seymour, whose term as Poet Laureate of Ohio was just extended by Governor Mike DeWine, is a people’s poet. She writes of her people, for her people, and spearheads the collection of regional voices into anthologies like Women Speak, a project celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. A modern-day Joanie Appleseed, Gunter-Seymour collects poems and carries them to poemless places, carefully situating them in spaces where they can flourish. In the new collection Dirt Songs, the latest collection in her own growing body of work, she takes a deep dive into the secrets of…
Review by Mary Ellen Talley Susan Rich demonstrates her command of poetic imagery and manuscript crafting in her sixth collection, Blue Atlas. The title refers to the resilient blue-green tipped cedar tree that is native to North Africa. “Hourglass,” the first of seven sections, sets the scene for poems about a resilient young woman. The poem, “This Could Happen,” (15) reimagines with the conditional, “If you kept walking out of the self // you could begin again as sea water, as spindrift.” In the first of seven sections, the poem, “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” (18) demonstrates Rich’s…
Jennifer Barber Writing Too Fast, I Write “Thew” for “The” As if you and I commingled +++++++++in the dark and later the same day I give birth to little baby Thew, +++++++++born in winter under a mauve sky. By early spring he cuts a tooth. +++++++++He sprouts a curl. The yard’s fescue and crabgrass thicken, lapping up the sun. +++++++++Warm in my arms, little baby Thew babbles his lips, laughing as he sees +++++++++a plane overhead, a dove on the roof calling another on a branch. +++++++++He and I flow into you like waves that slide across the sand…
Review by Sharon Tracey I Say the Sky, the second poetry collection by Nadia Colburn—poet, teacher, literary critic, and writing coach—is an immersive and moving read—infused with earth, the body, family, memory, love and anxiety, environmental devastation and beauty, trauma and community. Poems often startle and ring, and there’s the sensation of being inside the inner life of the poet. Colburn’s style is direct and conversational, and she has a deft way of transforming elemental objects and rituals of daily life into something larger. Stones are not just stones but a young girl, a door. And however deeply Colburn…
Review by Katie Kalisz In Emily Tuszynska’s debut poetry collection Surfacing, winner of the 2023 Grayson Books Poetry Contest, the speaker traces how a mother constantly self-divides and reemerges, “full of tenderness and dread” (19). The poems move between wonder at the world made new with an infant’s arrival, admiration for ordinary domestic routines, and persistent questions about being whole and living fully despite the way motherhood fragments the self. Dedicated to her three children, “who grew along with this book” and to her parents, Surfacing highlights the compelling beauty in motherhood’s paradoxes. Each child’s birth is a new…
Review by Rachel Howe Lisa Grunberger is a real working writer whose work spans genres from poetry [I am dirty (Moonstone Publishing, 2019), Born Knowing (Finishing Line Press, 2012)] to fiction [Yiddish Yoga (Harper Collins, 2009)] to playwriting (Almost Pregnant, Yiddish Yoga: The Musical, Evidence). Her poetry has won several awards, including the Moonstone Arts Center International Poetry Contest and the Brittany Stoakes Poetry Prize. That workaday style comes across in her latest collection of largely autobiographical poetry, For the Future of Girls, which was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and which focuses on the generational trauma…
Review by Emily Webber If you’ve ever seen shed snakeskin, you’ll know it has intricate texture and patterns, the way the light catches it can make it seem otherworldly. Some see snakes as a bad omen, but the snake shedding its skin indicates transformation and rebirth. Kristine Langley Mahler’s memoir, A Calendar is a Snakeskin, documents the year she turns thirty-eight, during the lockdown of the pandemic, a time of significant global upheaval. She examines how her world is shifting—the demands of being a mother, what home means, her relationship with her siblings and her work, and old…