r. erica doyle wander r. erica doyle is the author of proxy (Belladonna* Books). Her prose and poetry have been published in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing, and Letters from The Future: Black Women/Radical Writing among others. She has been a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow, a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers and a Roots. Wounds. Words. fellow in speculative fiction. Back…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Sunu P. Chandy Learning to Hold the Candle Solo parenting a nine-year-old during a Buddhist evening peace ceremony, we are asked to walk from the meeting hall to the pond a block away and place our boats with candles on the pond at dusk. The flames all flicker out during the walk to the pond given the extra windy evening, but the Buddhist monks come by with lighters and give us all second chances. After the second lighting, we learn, only through practice, how to hold the candle closed to the wind but not closed enough that it goes…
Wendy Grossman Praise For My Mother praise my mother and her big-boned beauty praise the breath she takes from me every time an old photo resurfaces praise those photos, sparse the same ones over and over praise especially the faded sepia one barely fourteen, her pixie smile tossed over shoulder proof how fleeting beauty can be praise my mother, she lived for forty-nine years gone now, thirty-five praise my mother whose father wouldn’t let her go to art school too wild for a girl in the 1950’s praise my mother who wouldn’t finish college after she and my father…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen For parents who have lost children, there are personal and highly distinctive similarities in their stories, and there are stark differences. If one is adept at writing non-fiction, one’s innermost revelations will become a helpful blueprint. In Ann McCloskey’s account of her daughter’s death in her book, These Dreams of You, McCloskey has managed the daunting task of creating a pathway from the intimate that leads straight to the universal realm. Even if you have not lost a child, this book is a hard one to get through. At times, through the unflinching and…
Dorsía Smith Silva Requiem my son asks for a baby brother for Christmas / so easily / like going to the drive-through / to get some ubiquitous made-to-order meal / Big Mac with extra cheese / onions and lettuce / what does he know / about the parade of prayers / shoehorned hormone shots / straitjacketed waiting / then nothing / but wind-blown ebbed echoes of please Jesus / hear me Jesus / sweet baby Jesus / another round of stolen surrender / then another / more blood enjambed / scything in rogue repair / someone / tell…
New and Coming Soon Sarah Gutowski, The Familiar. TRP: The University Press of SHSU January 2024. Poetry The Familiar is a narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis. It mimics the bizarre, darkly funny experience of midlife by making literal the multiple “selves” that women often have to embody and employ just to support a family, create a career, and maintain relationships. Fabulist and absurdist, this book features a mix of high and low language, philosophy, and pop culture while exploring the effects of second and third-wave feminism. It’s a book for anyone who’s vacillated between dreams, desires, and ambition on…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Cathy Ulrich’s second book, Small, Burning Things, she proves again how mighty flash fiction can be. These tight short stories are mostly women- or girl-centered, and all of the fiction brought in some uncomfortable aspect relationships. Small, Burning Things solidifies Urich’s position not only in the world a flash fiction, but in fiction in general. The first story, “A Burning Girl,” starts as a fairy tale would. “There was one day at school that one of the girls start on fire.” Such an absurd line compels the reader forward, including this reader, which…
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…
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…