Anjali Vaidya A Trip to the Aquarium My five-year-old has always had a mind of her own. And by always I really do mean that; she’s been loudly expressing her own opinions since the time, as a fetus, when her little feet kicked us away from the dining table my pregnant belly was wedged up against, because I wasn’t giving her enough space. These days we’ve got the art of conversation, but that’s an evolving skill. Given free reign, my daughter would just sit and draw all day. Of course I can’t give her complete free reign. Grudgingly she…
Author: Mom Egg Review
New & Noted Poetry (Full-length) Jessica Bell, A Tide Should Be Able To Rise Despite Its Moon. Vine Leaves Press 2023. Inspired by the special bond between mother and child, Bell’s poems search for meaning in a world of misconception. They begin with small everyday moments and end with a shift in understanding that not only enlightens, but leaves you wondering. From quiet nights reflecting on the sound of her child’s smile, to viewing the world from the perspective of a potted tree dreaming of being rooted into true mother earth, A Tide Should Be Able to Rise Despite Its…
Review by Melissa Ridley Elmes No poet is an overnight success. While Anna Laura Reeve’s first collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Tranquility was published by Belle Pointe Press earlier this year, with many of its poems finding their way into the pages of literary journals throughout 2021-23 to great acclaim, including winning the Beloit Journal’s Adrienne Rich Award and garnering two Pushcart nominations, her first poem was published in 2011. The silence of nearly a decade between that first poem and those comprising this collection should not be understood as empty. One of the great mistakes…
Review by Kimberly Ann Priest Flee Evil “Is the significant difference,” asks Fox Henry Frazier in Raven King, “between a man like Cas and a man like Charlie simply that Charlie chose to run away from his violent potential, rather than towards it?” (pg. 153). Frazier’s mausoleum of poems in Raven King, largely dedicated to the ghosts of harmed women past, is crowned by this question in the book’s final literary offering, an essay titled “I Live in the Shadow Hills.” Indeed, Raven King is a book of shadows, and the question is appropriately posed to underpin the speaker’s…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Linda Scheller’s moving and eloquent third collection arrives at a time when education is under fire and the sustainability of our environment remains a crucial issue. The poems in Wind & Children cling to the pages with an urgency borne of empathy and concern, cautionary vignettes that tumble with the tales of disenfranchised youth and the touring of fragile landscapes threatened by societal indifference. Scheller’s skill is evident in creating scenes that are determined, visual narratives that take the classroom or landscape into a nearly mythic realm and reveal a delicate sensibility in caring for…
Choices that Ache: A Review of Jacinda Townsend’s Mother Country by Brianna Avenia-Tapper “What, after all, to make of a choice?” Some choices are harder than others. Jacinda Townsend’s second novel, Mother Country, unfolds as a richly embodied exploration of choice in all its complexity. Townsend’s first novel Saint Monkey won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize in 2015. In Mother Country, she intertwines the lives of two protagonists in vastly different contexts such that readers are forced to consider the internal, external, and temporal forces that complicate clean and easy understandings of choice. Both protagonists are mothers. The first…
Elizabeth O’Rourke I Have Done Small Things today: have threaded the needle’s eye with the current favorite seafoam spool, have closed up the tear where the down spilled out of my daughter’s winter coat, have dragged the heavy bags back to the feeders lofting them on my shoulder and waited for the pouring sound to climb its rasping octave and the seed to reach the brim, have taken a moment midday to remind myself of my mother’s legs pedaling her bike to the post office on the backroads, have poured water on the roots of the olive tree and…
Ambriel Floyd Bostic curating my daughter’s first period kit at age 10 three weeks before she leaves for camp maybe three years before she needs it I cull, fill baskets market aisles like fruit trees bounty heavy and over-ripe the first time I stained my sheets I wanted to hide them but now they make special shorts for sleeping my daughter does not know what to do with her breasts but she has some idea they are becoming already she stands out from girls in her grade she is just shy of whatever metaphor we use to say puberty:…
James Callan An Otherwise Quiet Space Beneath the sheets, my four-year-old kneads my thighs with his feet. In his sleep, or semi-sleep, the many long minutes leading up to it, he grips my leg hairs with his impossibly hot, clammy toes. It’s not exactly painful, but it isn’t comfortable. It is not conducive to my own chance of slumber, even if it aids my son into his. When the little feet cease their steady, hot compresses, the toes their rhythmic grasp and pull, I listen in the otherwise quiet space and confirm by his even breathing that my son…
Alisa Childress To Mom of Eight Years Ago, I often wonder what you would think of yourself now. Of you have become. You are almost unrecognizable. You have always been the woman who took pride in her appearance. You never left the house without drawing on your eyebrows. You hated not having eyebrows. When you were pregnant with me, you prayed, not that I would be smart, or healthy, or have all my fingers and toes. You prayed that I would have eyebrows. After you and Dad divorced, you wanted to be a nun. You talked to the nuns at…