Review by Elizabeth Brown Fictions by Ashley Honeysett, the Miami University Press Novella Prize Winner 2023, is the author’s first book. She studied creative writing at Stephens College in Missouri and has lived in the United States, Ireland, and Japan. Before Fictions, she published poetry and prose in various literary journals. Written in almost a diary-like style, Fictions depicts the principal character’s life as a mother and her life as a writer. Writers will identify with the way she has interwoven these strands throughout. The style and tone work strongly together, juxtaposing the mundane and the dramatic in patchwork…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jane Ward Janelle Wolf’s birthday celebration is approaching, Charles Wolf’s business is going through a rebrand, and their daughter–Mira–is planning her wedding. On the surface, it appears the Wolf family leads a rather ordinary life. But award-winning author Mindy Friddle makes it clear from the start that life within the home of the Wolfs of Her Best Self is nothing close to mundane. Beneath the mannered surface lurks dysfunction and worse: lies, deceptions, and manipulations that threaten to bring down an entire dynasty. The novel toggles between events of 2015 and thirty years earlier when matriarch Janelle…
Review by Theta Pavis Carole Stone’s latest book Limited Editions (her sixth poetry collection) is a love song to a treasured life. Stone, a distinguished professor of English, Emerita, at Montclair State University, writes about a love that encompassed everything and the everything that must be survived after it is gone. From the very beginning, when her date mentions Ulysses, Stone knows she’s met someone to build a life with. Through that steadfast love she finds, even when she has to transition years later into the role of caretaker, a full appreciation for all life can give us. The…
Review by Annamaria Formichella After twenty years of publishing Literary Mama, a publication dedicated to writing for and by mothers, current and past staff members created a space to share their own stories in Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology. What strikes the reader most powerfully in this volume is the honesty with which this collection explores motherhood in all of its complexity. Thirty different writers, representing various ages, backgrounds, and family histories, express their truth in essays, stories, and poems. In a serendipitous coincidence, I found myself with this book in hand on Mother’s Day, riding…
Genoa Yanez-Alaniz Severing Maria In the photo she texted her excessive and carmine uterus — sits inside a sterile dish Her motherhood noduled — dead-fleshed and disposed severed limb of life once divining deity of Coatlicue — vigil of body and earth A newborn cries red-faced and gasping for that first burst of sacrifice served survival at mother’s breast — her enduring gift of sustenance Celebrated memory of gilded crown — of quinceañera princesa Curious reach for that alluring and elusive gasp of pulsing crimson honeysuckle bud and drip — piqued angel shape of sweetness Maria, spirit and embodiment of…
MER Bookshelf – June 2024 Staff Picks – new books of fiction, memoir, and poetry. –Compiled by Melissa Joplin Higley. Alison Stone, Informed, NYQ Books, May 2024, poetry Pulling traditional forms into the 21st century, Alison Stone uses pantoums, ghazals, a jeweled sonnet crown, and other structures to explore the subjects of contemporary life. Love, sex, family, politics, and the pandemic are both confined and liberated into the frameworks in which Stone places them. Claiming and owning these forms allows Stone to bring a rich and layered music to these poems, leaving the reader both moved and transformed.…
Writing Loss in Bits and Pieces: An Interview with Eileen Vorbach Collins about Love in the Archives: a patchwork of true stories about suicide loss Interview by Diane Gottlieb To live is to experience loss. Whether it be the loss of a job, a dream, a marriage, a loved one, we will all find ourselves, at one point or another, in the throes of grief. But some losses loom larger than others. Losing a child is one such loss, one that Eileen Vorbach Collins was faced with when her 15- year-old daughter Lydia died by suicide a little over twenty…
Review by Sharon Tracey Lady Wing Shot, the third prize-winning poetry collection by Sara Moore Wagner, takes us deep inside the life and times of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, a woman whose fame and legend has outlived and somewhat eclipsed her. From the first poem, “Annie Oakley as a First God” (13), Wagner writes her into life in vivid poems that weave historical facts, myth-making, and personal history. The poet is a terrific storyteller as she writes about the poise and power of a sharpshooting girl from an earlier era who can still speak to our time and America’s worship…
In “The Mother Artist,” Author Catherine Ricketts Imagines A World Shaped By Care Review by Kate Lewis The central question in author Catherine Ricketts’ new work of non-fiction, The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity, comes early on: “How might our world be humanized by work—art work, any work— made through a mother’s eyes?” (11) For Ricketts, the transformational experience of mothering – the tending to vulnerable bodies, the creation of communities, the constant giving of care – has the potential to shape not only art, but through art, it has the power to change the world.…
Review by Claire Raymond Franco-American poet Jeri Theriault’s Self-Portrait as Homestead envisions the marks that our histories leave on our bodies and on the houses that hold our bodies as we pass through them, bringing together domestic space and identity in elegant, if at times emotionally painful, poems. Although the revelations of the book can be intimate, bringing us into tender family and personal histories, the tone is notably restrained. The poems keep a kind of sacred distance from their subject matter, granting the reader a clear and luminous space to encounter the poet’s words. The poems’ structures are…