Review by Melanie McGehee Amanda Galvan Huynh’s debut poetry book Where My Umbilical is Buried tells her Chicano family’s story. It is a scrapbook journey, taking us through towns of rural Texas and the lives of three generations, beginning with Huynh’s grandmother. It is an exploration of leaving and settling and of morphing into one’s surroundings and clinging to one’s heritage. I easily went along with Huynh to each place and into the lives of each woman. Her poems were extremely approachable. Several poems from Huynh’s previous chapbook, The Songs of Brujería, are included here in this fuller collection…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jessica Manack Dedicated to her mother, the second collection of poems by Francesca Bell, What Small Sound, is a group of ruminations on being mothered and being a mother, and the way the former informs the latter, yet can never fully prepare one. Among a backdrop of natural and organic phenomena, she describes nurturing under extreme duress, in a world where hate, violence and cruelty color every day. Bell deftly balances the dual desires to praise and lament, from the first poem, in which the animal pleasures of feasting and running are mashed up against the news…
Review by Jiwon Choi Frances Donovan’s Arboretum in a Jar is an assertive and confident work in which the poet’s voice feels tautly woven into the cacophony of internal dilemmas and S.O.S mayhem fueling this who’s who in the fairy tale diaspora of our 21st Century. Donovan, whose previous work explores themes of family, home, sexual/gender identity, and intergenerational trauma, has given us much to consider and untangle in a poetry collection that comes on as a rambunctious coming of age drama set in a Teenage Wasteland. A wasteland that is an interstitial ecology of urban decay and…
Review by Sarah Lyn Rogers In Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise, two sisters buckle under lifelong pressure from their mother, Rita, who immigrated with their father, Jing, from Taipei and made enormous sacrifices to ensure that the girls would have an ideal life—which, to Rita, means a dutiful and financially successful one. This searching, often darkly humorous novel follows Eleanor, the “successful” daughter and scientist, who we learn never truly liked science—or is even especially good at it—but did enjoy the rare praise she received from being perceived as the studious one. Now, reckoning with her mother’s…
Review by Julia Lisella In Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s fourth collection of poems, Transitory, an epigraph from Carolyn Forché instructs: “‘Poetry of witness’ . . . doesn’t mean to write about political matters; it means to write out of having been . . . incised or even wounded by something that happened in the world.” What a gorgeous way to begin this heartbreaking tour through the year 2020, a deadly year in the U.S. for transgender and gender non-conforming people, though sadly, not an exceptional year according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Bacon stands both inside the torrent of…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg The poems in Carolina Hotchandani’s stunning debut comprise a woman’s journey to the self through many guises—daughter, scholar, mother, poet—and reveals how identity can be a fragile construct, whether inherited, imagined, or influenced by those who are deeply connected to us. These contemplative and elegantly crafted poems examine, in revolving sequences, the delicate process of reinforcing one’s identity in the sharing (and preserving) of familial and personal narrative, especially by those with fading memories who gave us life or whom we bring into this world and overwrite our stories with their own. In “Once You…
Erica Bodwell Child, Mother This child, who started as autumn leaves blown against the house, paper crane with a secret code folded inside, dream from which I believed I’d awaken, untroubled, to the old landscape—as easily as setting out milk for stray kittens. This child, who emerged from my sliced-through womb as flame flickering in a liminal space, threatening to be extinguished. When the nurse waiting at the ER doors lifted him from my arms, I collapsed on the sidewalk, twigs flattened underfoot, the vibrating ground echoing my lone beating heart. Who would teach me how to be less…
New and Notable Lisa Grunberger, For the Future of Girls. Kelsay Books 2023. Poetry. For the Future of Girls is at once family album, inventory of memories, a reckoning with time, and a plea for love to last. Lisa Grunberger’s vibrant and meticulously detailed poems lay bare Jewish histories where trauma, loss, and misogyny take both intimate and collective shape. These poems refuse to forget, and their refusal offers a light for our daughters.” — Maya Pindyck, American poet and visual artist, Director of writing and a professor at Moore College of Art and Design. Diane Josefowicz L’Air du Temps (1985).…
Review by Emily Webber Audra Kerr Brown’s collection of flash fiction, hush hush hush, at twelve stories and under forty pages, holds its power in its brevity. It is the shortest collection I’ve read this year, yet it stands out with all the longer works. One of the shortest stories in the collection, “Illumination,” is about a woman falling in love with a light bulb after a miscarriage. A reader might have doubts that Kerr Brown can pull this off, especially in a story that is only seven sentences long. Then there’s this sentence: The bulb had an electrical…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Nicelle Davis is poet, collaborator, teacher, and performance artist residing in California who “…uses uses video, poetry, performance and publication to discuss topics ranging from artistic collaboration, feminist identity, poverty and power, and the environment.” (nicelledavis.net). She is the author of four previous books of poetry, and her poetry/film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown around the world. The Language of Fractions is a collection of poems and mixed media. Some poems span several pages, others are only a few lines long. In-between are wonderful drawings of maps and dangerous things, as well as…