Review by Melanie McGehee Mulberry Street Stories by Mary Slechta won the 2021 Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, an award that celebrates the best in contemporary fiction by writers of the African Diaspora. These twenty-five interwoven stories told in 190 short pages will surprise, delight, and sometimes confuse. Slechta proves herself a masterful storyteller as she conjures a neighborhood of characters that move in and out from each story selection, idling between past and present and, perhaps, future timelines. Mulberry Street is fantastical – in parts. We begin with a fairy or folk tale of sorts. A young girl Dessa…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Mindy Kronenberg So much is summoned in the diminutive but sleek and dark edition of Ex Machina, or perhaps “unleashed” is a better word. The poems in this collection by Joan Naviyuk Kane pulse with language that captures varying energy– floats with incantation-like recitations on the landscape, unfurls in the fragile indignities of womanhood, and hammers at the dilemma of detachment from one’s ancestral legacy. Kane’s narrative versatility can recall Silko or Eliot, and each mesmerizes with its own sense of urgency or cautionary tale, whether within the larger concerns of identity and empowerment, and exist as…
María DeGuzmán is a scholar, photographer, writer, and music composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Apricity, Phoebe, The Banyan Review, Oyster River Pages, Oxford Magazine, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Roanoke Review, 45th Parallel, Inverted Syntax, Mandorla, Huizache, and La Piccioletta Barca.
MER Online Quarterly March, 2024 Welcome to MER Quarterly! This issue explores connection and change, in poetry, art, memoir, and more. Image: “Caught Between Worlds” by María DeGuzmán THE WAY WE WERE: Motherhood as a Catalyst for Change A new poetry folio curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach, features poems that explore the ways motherhood changes us, including relationships, self-image, identity, health. Featured Poets: Erin Armstrong Rachel Becker Rebecca Brock Caridad Moro-Gronlier Natasha Herring Elizabeth Hutchinson Amy Lee Marjorie Maddox Rachel Neve-Midbar Sunayna Pal Laura Read GIRLFRIENDS 2 A new…
THE WAY WE WERE: Motherhood as a Catalyst for Change In her poem, “Learning Language,” Erin Armstrong writes, “Extinguished are the mornings where I rise / alone to my writing, my coffee, my sense of self. . .” The poems in the March MER Folio, “The Way We Were,” explore how motherhood forever changes us: our bodies, our worries, and how we navigate this world. The poems examine these changes with honesty; they are physical and feel the changes in their bones. In many ways, we could have called this folio “That Was Then, This Is Now.” The poems…
Laura Read Winged Victory When I walked up the stairs in the Louvre towards The Winged Victory, I cried as I told my son the story of when I brought my mom to see her and she wept and told me she never thought she’d get here, and he said, Say something cool I can tell my children some day, and I said, I miss my mother at 46. You are supposed to view The Winged Victory from the side to understand the full force of her body leaning into the wind on her imaginary ship, but I always see…
Sunayna Pal My Infant’s Nails small but sharp scratch my chest trying to grab on like a fledgling learning to get its grip living this new life I start the trim on the thumbnail cut his skin instead he cries I cry he stops I don’t Sunayna Pal was born and raised in Mumbai, India, now calls Maryland home. She has made her literary mark with her debut poetry book, Refugees in Their Own Country (B&W Fountain), which explores the Partition of India. Her evocative poetry graces the pages of numerous international journals and anthologies, museums, poetry festivals,…
Rachel Neve-Midbar Letter To My Children Sand between our toes and pockets full of sea glass—you sparkle, each of you. The smallest ones fuss, though the moon continues to pull the tide out to where it can’t be reached. Is this what we are searching for, the blue that haunts us? Once we believed it was G-d who eluded us. Now we know better—the cycles nothing more than gerbil runs to next year and the next. Yes, there will be more of you, but you will never swarm around me— not in the way I had hoped. Just as…
Marjorie Maddox XXX-XX-XXXX Not here, no, not obediently typed ____________before name, beside height_____________, below weight____________, alongside eye color__________, hair color_____________, marital status_______, number of children___, number of pregnancies___, inside skin and all affiliations, inside_________ me, now___________ blank. No longer here___________ or here _____________, bowing to the requested, the required, to the fill-in-the-form formalities of the everyday but also somewhere else unlisted______________, imprinted on the fingertips of strangers (names unknown) clicking their way across (required field here ___________) cyberspace, across who I am or was here______________ and over here_____________ before everything (please list items in order of disappearance) ______________________ ______________________…
Amy Lee Seahorses everyone assured you how you will feel better after the water breaks. but no one told you about the third-degree tearing, the brain fogs, the Mummy’s wrist which prevented you from holding your own baby. now, you wished you were a female seahorse instead – for male seahorses give birth. Amy Lee is a lawyer based in Seattle. She holds a BA (Govt)/LLB, UQ, a LLM from The University of Melbourne. She is the Managing Editor of Quail Bell Magazine, a NYC based progressive feminist digital platform. Her work has been published in Canada, UK,…