Ibu Robin Lim When Bear was Born Grizzly bears give birth in Winter hibernation. My daughter’s saltwater woke her. Later I thought I saw invisible salamanders coiled around her feet. Back home, in Indonesia, our volcano erupted. I tipped the Ferryman well: turmeric milk, and a batik shawl, very dear, rushing him to row quickly across the river, Pain, for my third born. All her dreams ransomed away in a half heartbeat, when the blood came, when the beating of Bear’s almost born heart slowed, she became more a mother than I ever was. She slipped down, across seven rivers,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Crystal Karlberg In The New Year My children scatter likes stones and all of last year’s accumulated knowledge is already useless. Extant is a passive way of saying we exist. Once I lost my car in the airport parking lot. What is terminal in Nature? What is the nature of illness? You can bear a burden or bare your soul with all the same letters, but arrangement is everything. My mother knew about flowers, how to bash their stems with the butt of a knife to keep them drinking. Warm water is more enticing to most people, though hot springs…
Come to our Off site Event at AWP with SWWIM, NELLE, and Whale Road Review! Featured Readers MER: DeMisty D. Bellinger, Eileen Cleary, JP Howard, Abby E. Murray, Anna V.Q. Ross NELLE: Melissa Ginsburg, Rachel Richardson, Nicole Callihan, Beth Staples, Francesca Bell SWWIM: Brenda Cárdenas, Silvia Curbelo, Suzanne Frischkorn, Didi Jackson, Kashiana Singh Whale Road Review: Lauren Camp, Kai Coggin, Patricia Davis-Muffet, Kelly Foster Lundquist, Jane Muschenetz Cash bar available. We hope to see you there!
MER at 2024 AWP in Kansas City
MER February Bookshelf Lots of intriguing new and recent books, many from our contributors. Take a look! Morgan Baker Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes (Ten16Press, May 2023; memoir) is about reinventing yourself, learning how to handle loss, and emerging from depression. When Morgan’s daughter, Maggie, left for college and Morgan also parted with nine puppies from a litter the family raised, she collapsed into a deep depression. She was, however, ready when Maggie moved to LA with her boyfriend after graduation. Morgan focused on herself, and her needs. Her identity shifted. Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at…
Review by Laura Dennis I love novels for the vast landscapes they traverse, the many shades of human experience they evoke. Although short fiction elicits pleasure on a different scale, every so often I encounter a story collection that offers both closely observed situations and a wide-ranging emotional exploration. Sara Hosey’s recently released Dirty Suburbia: Stories is one such book. As I read, I often felt I had either known or been some version of Hosey’s female characters. I frequently wanted to cringe, even as I admired the author’s skill in depicting ordinary women’s lives. The protagonists are not…
Review by Jessica Manack “It was when spring felt real. As if/it would stick around for a while (59).” In her fifth collection, Oblivescence, or “the act of forgetting,” accomplished poet Kelly R. Samuels takes the reader on the journey of losing a parent to Alzheimer’s disease. Through a maze of medical terms sounding like sinister foes, like anomia and alexithymia, Samuels aims to understand her mother’s condition, to ease her discomfort, although the emotional blows that occur on the journey of being a caretaker to a memory loss patient come without warning, without preparation. Taking the reader on…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Lately, I’ve been obsessed with groups of three: triads, tercets, triplets. There is a wyrd sisterhood about the number, mystical and yet as sturdy as a wooden stool. Thomas De Quincey, in his book of essays, Suspiria De Profundis, writes, “and they are three in number, as in the Graces . . . the Parcae . . . the Furies . . . even the Muses.” So when I read Jane Satterfield’s masterful collection, The Badass Brontës, I was smitten. In “Gigan for a Pandemic Winter,” Satterfield writes, Once three sisters watched the world turn…
Praise Poems and the Poets Who Write Them MER Online Folio with Bonus Poetry Prompts Curated by JP Howard
Review by Sharon Tracey Emily Hockaday’s poetry collection, In a Body, is a study in shape-shifting and an exploration of the intimate relationship between the body and pain as a mother, daughter, and partner. The presence of pain hovers over her motherhood: chronic and like a child tugging on a shirt for attention, always there. She notices and observes, acknowledges and wonders as she makes meaning and connects her own pain to the suffering she sees in the natural world. Along the way, she deftly threads the language and mystery of science within the poems, informing and enriching them.…