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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Hayes Davis Letter to Myself as a New Father January 6, 2009 I know this finds you flushed with new, marveling at her swaddled heft, tiny mouth suckling your finger. You’re picturing the sky butterscotch and currant, the magic hour gilding her tiny legs, her little hand in yours along Sligo Creek’s emerald spring evening, baby ducks lined behind mama, tree frogs tuning up. You can’t wait to hurtle February’s enameled sledding hills, ride July’s swollen surf. All that will happen, but in a few days she’ll pee on you—they all do—and soon four hours of sleep will feel…
Ashley Espinoza 27 Miles “Should I have nursed her inside the room?” I asked my mom. As a single mother I needed her to drive me to the clinic, 27 miles from my home. “I don’t know, maybe?” My mom said as my daughter swung back and forth in the carrier. “It’s okay I’ll just nurse her in the car.” When we got to the car my daughter was asleep. “I hate to wake her up, do you think we’ll make it home?” “She’ll be okay.” My mom assured me. I sat next to my daughter in the back…
Jennifer Furner The Adventurers The locker room was boisterous with women’s voices and running water, and I navigated my way through naked bodies to the showers with my baby in my arms. A woman, fully dressed, sat behind glass watching everyone wash, ensuring no one was half-assing it; a clean body was required to enter Iceland’s communal pools. 9-month-olds were not exempt. I ran some soap over my daughter’s skin, my grip slipping, then collected shower water in my free hand and splashed it at her. She whined and squirmed from me. I sat her, naked, in a nearby…