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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Welcome to the Fall Edition of MER Quarterly! Food As Nourishment and Metaphor A Poetry Folio Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featuring: Cynthia Atkins, Ana María Carbonell, Keats Raptosh Conley, Diane Raptosh, Anna Abraham Gasaway, Nicole Greaves, Jen Karetnick, Merie Kirby, Anya Kirshbaum, Kashiana Singh, Raeshell Sweeting, Elinor Ann Walker Book Reviews & Interviews MER Bookshelf – September 2023 New books of poetry and memoir MER Quarterly – September 2023 image by Suzanne Altman. http://suealtmanart.com
Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach In her poem, “I will hunger,” Elinor Ann Walker states “All paths lead toward hunger,” and that The maw is the mother, her mouth, the oven, the hope that appetite leaves you, gaping, wild, sated. The poems in the September folio examine food in all its aspects: how it evokes memory and history; how it transforms the body and landscapes; how its absence leaves us wanting. In “Tapestry,” Cynthia Atkins’ speaker recollects herself as a teen with Carole King’s famous album, and asks Who knew when I sat cross-legged on the floor…
Jen Karetnick Babka “What they lacked in richness they made up for ‘with the delightful swirls,’ and the inclusion of chocolate was a mid-twentieth century American Jewish invention.” https://food52.com/blog/18792-the-babka-you-ve-seen-everywhere-isn-t-really-babka-after-all Matriarchal fertility cake named for grandmothers, it’s more than an excuse for sixteenth-century panettone. It’s the heaven we only colloquially have faith in, thanks to Poland’s Queen Sforza and Ukrainian Jews, the peasantry of pleated skirts that its creased, tucked sides smack of. I built it with my own progenitors, the dough first sometimes frozen overnight for uniform rolling, lined up like winter puddles. They never used expensive ingredients, only…
Raeshell Sweeting On weaning The day after it happened you walked up the steps holding onto the short rail. You told me you were a big girl. You could “do it yourself!” You did not ask can you hold me? That night you were determined to use the chopsticks and eat ramen “by yourself!” But at some point, you tire of the struggle – careful coordinated dance of utensil and food, you ask me can you feed me? I take the chopsticks you hand me, nimble fingers doing the work to grasp…
Elinor Ann Walker I will hunger “the wind, the wind,/ the heavenly child”—Hansel and Gretel “Don’t confuse hunger with greed; And don’t wait until you are dead.”—Ruth Stone, “Advice” All paths lead toward hunger. Hunger is a snarling wolf, a house of confection, the sweet that rots the tooth, the cramp that drowns her, an ogre, an ache in the voice of a mother, stepmother, witch. They say to the children, do not stray off the path, do not ask for anything. In her small hands, hunger dissolves like sugar; in his, a breadcrumb turns to dust, a brittle…
Kashiana Singh How to destroy a sunny side up, like an 8-month-old practice what you preach, walk the talk, show vs tell he learned to devour the yolk before he learned to bite into a toast, wonder where he got that from? he likes eggs. period. boiled are good with a steal of salt, crushed pepper, sprinkle of cumin powder but the sunny side up tender perfection of a golden center, sunshine himself, dribble spit streaked with oblique white, deepest yellow dotted with toast crumbs, or pepper crushed onto a lissome pattern of celebratory ochre a smile reaching his…
Anya Kirshbaum In the Midst of Catastrophe, She Blesses What Falls I’m here to confess the asian pear tree in our yard had a year of unabashed bounty, fruits hanging like succulent yellow baubles, so heavy the crown drooping, so close to toppling. And how it was a joy upon first discovery that I could hardly stomach. Glowing like some gaudy garden of riches. The waste the idle glut some kind of beautiful dagger. And that I almost made sake and pear sorbet. I say almost— a truth of which I am slightly ashamed. Now the rotting fruits stink…