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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Interview by Diane Gottlieb Sending a child off to college or out on her own is an important life passage for parents. While preparing a child to successfully “leave the nest” is the ultimate goal and at least one of the measures typically used to evaluate one’s effectiveness as a parent, that new stage can be felt as a great loss. Jill Talbot’s The Last Year: Essays, a gorgeous collection based on her 2020 column for The Paris Review, chronicles the year before her daughter Indie leaves for college. Talbot, a single mother who raised Indie on her own…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader The Geography of First Kisses, winner of Kallisto Gaia Press’s Acacia Prize, is a collection of fourteen short stories by Karin Cecile Davidson, author of the novel Sybelia Drive. The stories vary in that they are told from different perspectives, span the mid-fifties to today, and are set in locales ranging from Gulf Coast states to Midwest prairies, with a couple of stops outside U.S. borders. The constants are the lyrical and layered prose, and the focus on girls and young women. Whether these characters come down Lucinda Williams’s gravel road of the epigraph…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger Chia-Lun Chang’s debut poetry collection, Prescribee, achieves parity of ornate language and critical thought throughout, shining a spotlight on unfair immigration policies and xenophobia, but still allowing herself to be playful at times and depart from the heavier subjects. From beginning to end, Chang adeptly addresses one’s own identity in an aggressively hostile environment, questioning womanhood and personhood in an adaptive country. It is clear why this intricate collection won the Nightboat Poetry Prize. The first poem, “Parents,” works well as an introduction to the ensuing poems in that it acts as an origin…