Interview by Sara Weiss Choose This Now is a novel-in-stories following two friends across twenty years as they grow up, grow apart, and grow together. It is about art, labor, love, pregnancy, and parenthood—and the role of friendship in forging a life. Upstairs, as Soraya gets into a stash of shoes, chewing on a well-used sneaker we really probably didn’t need secondhand, Val says, “You remember—the baby phase was really rough for me. I was so consumed by Berry that I felt like I didn’t even have myself for company. I couldn’t wait for her to go to school, to…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Dayna Patterson Many poets are familiar with Trish Hopkinson, the “selfish poet.” She is not just a supremely skilled poet herself, but a friend to poets, guiding writers as they navigate the complex Poetryverse through her website, trishhopkinson.com. Here, novices and experts alike can find submission tips and tricks, interviews with editors about what they’re looking for, lists of feminist lit mags, chapbook/book contests that don’t charge submission fees, etc., etc. It’s an astonishing collection of poetry resources, generously shared and maintained by Hopkinson. Once in a while, she will tootle her horn, sharing publication news about…
Review by Sara Epstein Suzette Mullen is the founder of Your Story Finder nonfiction book coaching and a founding board member of the Lancaster (PA) LGBTQ+ Coalition. Her “tiny love story,” the seed which became this book, was published in the New York Times “Modern Love” column. This memoir The Only Way Through is Out is Suzette Mullen’s first book. It is her poignant story of coming out as a lesbian in her fifties, when she reckons with having been in love with her best friend (a straight woman) for 18 years. She has been in a safe, comfortable marriage…
Exciting new titles in nonfiction and poetry. Catherine Ricketts The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity. Broadleaf Books, April 16, 2024 This work of literary nonfiction blends memoir with studies of the art and lives of women artists who had children, including Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Neel, Ruth Asawa, Joan Didion, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison, as well as many emerging contemporary artists. The Mother Artist debunks the myth that to be an artist you must give up a family life, demonstrates the very real challenges facing women who aspire to rise in their disciplines, and explores the uniquely humanizing vision…
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…
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…