Review by Gabby Gilliam Talk Smack to a Hurricane is a powerful debut collection from Lynne Jensen Lampe that explores the complicated relationship a child has with a parent who is mentally ill. Lampe’s mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and manic-depression shortly after giving birth. She spent the first year of Lampe’s life in an institution, and she was reinstitutionalized throughout Lampe’s childhood. The poet’s love for her mother is evident in every line of this collection, but it’s not an easy or carefree type of love. It’s a love of constant struggle. With lines like “She fights inner…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Christine Salvatore In her first full-length poetry collection, long-time editor and reviewer Theresa Burns gives us a close-up examination of the everyday world around us. Riffing off Robert Frost’s much-loved poem “Design,” titular poems are sprinkled throughout the book and denoted by the numbers one through four, appearing in all but one of the five sections of the collection. In the first poem, “Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark,” Burns draws our eye to a man-made garden near a train platform. In this urban setting, the speaker of the poem questions…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Navigating the Reach, Mary Buchinger’s fourth full-length poetry collection, the poet wrestles with the slow grief and disorientation of losing a parent and one’s place in the world and how to make meaning of loss. She aptly sums up the challenge, titling one poem “Dying takes every day” and “asks everything” (17) Buchinger’s poems unspool in lovely narrative lines across time as she triangulates the self with distant points—the home where she grew up in Michigan, her garden back East, an offshore island in Maine. Each a touchstone, a place to weave a cloth…
Barbara Henning Selections from Girlfriend Girlfriend is a collection of poetic prose short-shorts about my relationships with girl and women friends from childhood through my present elder years. When I showed my esteemed yoga teacher Genny Kapuler what I had written about her, she said, “I feel honored to be one of the beads in the Mala, one of your sisters.” I like to think about it like that, as a meditation, as a string of beads. Included are friends, family, teachers, mentors and certain women authors and characters who were meaningful to me at important moments and…
MER Featured Fiction Death of the Water Bug by Lore Segal Lucinella wrote to Bridget: ‘We never outlive a shy, uncomfortable shame before asking a friend, especially another writer, to give us the time and attention to read what we have written. ‘Death of a Water Bug’ was accepted by a journal, had me write my ‘no more than fifty-word bio’ but never explained why they did not publish the story. Please, please believe that I am asking for your shamelessly honest opinion.’ Bridget replied, ‘I do. I completely believe that we believe that we want our reader’s…
Tamara J. Madison Till Poem for Mamie Till We have buried you so many times, sifted through files and notes, slipped our fingers through cracks and crevices to find some semblance of sense, justice, why- praying it soothe us, lay you finally to rest. Still our palms and hearts echo canyons barren. Instead of sorting puzzle pieces of your murder, I choose to crown you, Mamie’s baby, with a life poem. Emmett, you amber-eyed, butterscotch, Chi-slick, Black man-child with the tripping tongue, I choose to write that bounce back into your Midwest swagger…
Review by Melanie McGehee Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize in 2022 from BOA Editions, Ltd. and was published in their New Poets of America series in 2023. It is an impressive first compilation with fifty-two poems, many individually published previously in dozens of literary journals, arranged in a kind of narrative arc of life. Ray begins with “The End of August,” a poem describing how she, like the beetles and cicadas, lives within the cycles of nature, full of desire inside a finite life, and how she, unlike those insects, routinely…
Review by Jessica Manack The Japanese practice of kintsugi has been much-referenced over the last years. Referring to a repair technique in which cracked ceramic ware is reassembled with glue and paint, often brilliantly golden or silver, the emphasis is usually on the surprising way a damaged item, instead of being cast aside, can be made even more beautiful in its mending. Less is made of the way the mending restores the function of the object, allowing it to embody its essential state of being. For those who grew up in the industrial Rust Belt, industry was not only…
Review by Sherre Vernon I don’t know if it’s because Jessica L. Walsh shares my grandmother’s maiden name, or if it was her opening line: “My first found kin were killers” (1), but she had me from the moment I picked up her Book of Gods & Grudges. There’s something to be said for a collection that opens all your wounds, (with the hatchet on its cover), and does so with lyricism and compassion. The Book of Gods & Grudges is written in four parts, with each section break marking a turn in the speaker’s lived experience. Walsh’s…
New Poetry Books of Note Francesca Bell, What Small Sound. Red Hen Press 2023. Francesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers us an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss…