Abby E. Murray Heirloom I’m driving while talking to my eight-year-old about how even good people can be jerks sometimes and there’s a pause then she asks from her booster seat in the back but how come you’ve never been a jerk? and the question is a cluster of jewels I can carry on my collarbone: my daughter’s belief that I am too good to ever be unkind, because for her, in this moment, on this day, I am. Reader, I have plans for this memory. Why not take it home to save for later, keep it in the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jennifer Georgescu Mother Series Titles from “Mother Series” 1) Boost 2) Dough 3) Fading Away 4) Milk Veins 5) Thorns Artist Statement “Mother Series” is an ongoing, long term project that began in 2015 following the birth of my first son. In our beginning days, I had no time to think, no time to sleep, and I didn’t dream. I began to feel like a shell of a person whose identity had become lost somewhere along the way. My son nursed relentlessly and I spent all day and night staring into his tiny face. I began to think…
Welcome to MER Bookshelf, a listing featuring noteworthy new and recent books by our contributors, community members, and the literary world at large that share a focus on motherhood and women’s lives. Selected 2022 Poetry Releases of Note Theresa Burns, Design. Terrapin Books 2022 Inspired by the poem “Design” by Robert Frost, the book explores the myriad meanings of that word in a contemporary woman’s life–aesthetic beauty, fate, intention, the intelligence at work in nature’s systems. The poems here exist in the tender, awkward spaces of mid-life, between aging and dying parents and children bristling to break free. A…
Review by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein Suzanne Farrell Smith’s astonishing new essay collection is a quick read but a long contemplation; even the shortest pieces stayed with me long after I’d closed the book’s (gorgeous) cover. The structure is not chronological. We move back and forth in time with the author, from childhood to motherhood, from her early dating days to her later years as a teacher. But we are always grounded, never lost. Each chapter title is underlined by a wavy timeline, scrawled like barbed wire, with the year that the chapter covers highlighted. The pieces range from lyrical to…
Review by Laura Dennis Sita, a young Indian-American anthropology graduate who writes copy for MetLife, marries Pierre, a French-Vietnamese businessman. His work takes them to Norway, where she struggles to adapt, despite or perhaps because she has a talking mongoose named Nenn, a son named Lars, and a new friend, Mona, who seems to be the only other woman in town who is not white. Behind her in America, Sita has left her parents and her two closest friends: Micah, a fellow anthropology student who has immersed himself in Quechua, and Bhoomija, an artist who wants to clear a…
Review by Jane Ward In Circling Flight is the first novel by Jane Harrington, short story author and professor of English at Washington & Lee University. In 2019, the manuscript was awarded the Brighthorse Prize, an honor which included publication in 2022. In this novel, Harrington has turned her considerable talents of observation and storytelling to a corner of Appalachia where some locals live in seasonal harmony with the land while others are driven from it by the devastation caused by mountaintop removal mining. In “Book One: Way Out Farm,” we meet Leda, occasional tutor and novice goat farmer,…
Review by Emily Webber In Zoe Ballering’s short story collection, There Is Only Us, each of the eight speculative fiction stories is surprising, funny, and thought-provoking. In stories spread across time—biblical times, pandemic times, future worlds—Ballering’s characters often face a frightening unknown trying to stave off loneliness, figure out where to stake their beliefs, and deal the connections that endure regardless of how much chaos the world spins up around us. In two stories, “Ark” and “Luz Luz,” the characters face God’s wrath. In “Luz Luz,” God starts to disappear everyday objects in retaliation for how humans have treated…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Elizabeth Strauss Friedman writes in her title, “Lost Positive (Centaurus Constellation—Centaur),” Untamed| As women ought to be, life outside male invalidation advertently galloping into stardust. In her latest collection, The Lost Positive, Constellation Poems, Strauss Friedman creates a night sky, a cosmology of star clusters in four sections that tells the story of the “Chained Woman,” “Strongmen who fancy themselves gods,” “Men’s Tools,” and finally, “Beasts.” These constellations have always reflected the myths we’ve been taught; here, they are given voice through astronomy and poetry, and shine with a contemporary light. Strauss Friedman’s use of…
Review by Hester L. Furey Nicole Callihan’s new book This Strange Garment delivers a stunning sequence of poems about the experience of breast cancer. A survivor myself, I selected the book for the theme, remembering Audre Lorde’s insistence that “cancer is political.” Very quickly, however, the reading of it took me away from familiar generalizations and far out to an unknown sea. In forty-three poems the book bodies forth the manifold strange and alien forms of a truth expressed in a seed sentence, “this is my temporary body.” The first poem is called “Everything is Temporary”; the last poem…
Review by Sherre Vernon Lisa C. Taylor is the author of two collections of short fiction, Impossibly Small Spaces (Arlen House, 2018) and Growing a New Tail (Arlen House, 2015), as well as five collections of poetry including Interrogation of Morning (Arlen House, 2022), and The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House, 2011) written collaboratively with Geraldine Mills. Near the start of Interrogation of Morning, Taylor’s speaker implores, “Help me finish this poem” (“Poem as Dreamer Requests Help” 29), and it is this invitation that carries me through to the title poem, fifty pages later. When the speaker says,…