Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader LaToya Jordan has many illustrious writing credits, including a piece in Mom Egg Review 13; several are devoted to the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, and she writes across several genres. To the Woman in the Pink Hat is a worthy addition to these topics, and in a speculative-fiction vein. Published by Aqueduct Press, her novella is Vol. 87 in their Conversation Series, a collection of short works of, or about, feminist science-fiction. The press prides itself on bringing “challenging” texts to “demanding readers”: Jordan’s entry fulfills these objectives. The challenging and demanding…
Author: Mom Egg Review
An Interview with Debut Memoirists Lauren Kay Johnson and Paige Towers Interview by Emily Avery-Miller The Fine Art of Camouflage by Lauren Kay Johnson is a debut memoir that explores what it means to be a woman in a war zone, to be a parent or child in a military family, and how the stories we tell can both expose and obscure the realities of the power and trauma of war. I ache for the woman who [jumped] right back into the flurry of Wife, Mother, Cook-to-order Chef, Taxi Driver, Schedule Master, Center of Gravity . . .…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Jennifer Jean’s new collection of poems, a powerful memoir of both dispirited and defiant vignettes, captures the wistful journey of seeking connection to one’s origins, obtaining a sense of belonging, and enduring the emotional dissonance of the disenfranchised in a promised land of perfect families and glittering landscapes. Jean’s personal narratives—many encompassing the pain of an early life without family stability– interwoven with societal messages of ferocious cheerfulness– are summoned by what she terms “saturations”—the ekphrastic summoning of intimate episodes from an immersion into musical selections (popular tunes that are listed with notes in the…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Melissa Crowe’s Lo (her second collection of poems) is compelling, even suspenseful. Each poem pulls us farther—irresistibly—into the speaker’s rural childhood, through the trauma of molestation, and into the complexities of adulthood. I followed eagerly, utterly absorbed. Why? Two things occur to me. First, the poems capture a feeling I suspect we all share of being haunted—by different ghosts perhaps, but surely we all have some hovering regret, horror, or fear we’d love to expel. And second, through their lush details and direct address, the poems invite the reader so emphatically in. As the title…
Review by Carla Panciera Samuel Taylor Coleridge long ago advised readers that, to fully appreciate the magical, the mysterious, the outlandish, we need to suspend our disbelief. That is solid advice for sitting down with Jennifer Fliss’s collection, As If She Had a Say. In these stories, characters create balloon animals at funerals; they give birth, but not to babies. One woman’s vagina projects movies. This is an imaginative journey through the very real struggles in the lives of Fliss’s characters. We may never have had a tiny woman living in our refrigerator or a tub drain clogged with…
Puma Perl Learning to Say No Keep your eyes open. Place your tongue along the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth. Do not smile. Smiles become yes, stretch into of course, and before you blink twice your clothes are off or you’re cat-sitting or buying shoes that don’t fit. Do not smile. Position your mouth into a little O. Move your tongue forward. Release Make a little noise. Growl if you must. Do not smile. Originally published in MER Vol. 8 “Lessons” 2010 Puma Perl is a poet, writer, and performer and is the author of two chapbooks,…
New Poetry Books Thinking of completing Nicole Sealey’s Poetry Challenge (read one poetry book each day for the month of August)? Check out some of these new releases! Nicelle Davis, The Language of Fractions. Moon Tide Press 2023. Nicelle Davis’s collection The Language of Fractions explores the question of whether we love wholly or only in parts. Employing found poetry, Davis raises issues of omphalophobia, love over time, missed communication, superficiality, and environmental destruction. Through her use of juxtaposing images and writing styles, Davis shows how love can be fragile and can often fail. The Language of Fractions obsesses over the question: Do…
Down Here We Come Up, a novel by Sara Johnson Allen Review by Jane Ward In Down Here We Come Up, 2022 winner of the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize, debut novelist Sara Johnson Allen propels us into the lives of three women–mothers linked by the loss of their children and a thrumming maternal desire to reunite with them. The novel’s prologue, with its imagery of an apology issuing forth from a dying mother’s lips to rustle, snake, and skim its way across the country until it reaches her estranged daughter, promises dynamic storytelling ahead. The gripping novel that…
Hands Are Necessary When You’re Trying To Reshape The World: Reflections On Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe Review by Crystal Condakes Karlberg Ama Codjoe is full of questions in, Bluest Nude, her second poetry collection, after Blood of the Air. And aren’t we all? The question many of us are asking and one that Codjoe tries to answer is: When the worst has already happened, what next? We look to poets for the answers, but where do poets look? In Codjoe’s case: nature, other forms of art, the past, the self, mythology, religion, ghosts. She asks questions of, and…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Places We left Behind: A Memoir in Miniature is an essay collection—concise at 74 pages—exploring the cross-cultural marriage between Jennifer Lang, and her French-born and more religious husband. The pair move back and forth between Paris, Israel, and the United States, marrying, having children, changing jobs and trying to navigate their differences in religious practices and expectations. In the book’s eponymous essay Lang writes, “No matter where we reside, one of us will always rue the loss of the place we left behind.” I love experimental forms, so I was hooked the minute I saw…