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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
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…
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…