Diane Raptosh As for Your Grandma Concettine Let x = any number of grandmothers / Let’s say yours never praised your name / Let’s test / Let’s circumflex / My history = your grandmother ^my mom^ me > you / Let’s wand | Let’s witch / Let rooster bones stew / Let the clouds whoop / Let marrow steam / Let’s dress ourselves in drips / Let’s lax / Let why walk / Let fat hollow out its stock / Let’s intersperse love with buckled knees and straightened backs / with sleepers snugged in twos like sticks || Let…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Keats Raptosh Conley Your mother, whose name I could never pronounce Dear Mom, Today we killed the rooster and as we boiled his bones I thought of the grandmother whose name I could never pronounce but reminded me of the Tom Petty song— ya never slow down ya never grow old. How she used to sing the praises of bone broth, of collagen, never of me. The rooster stock dresses the windows in steam, and I imagine her own bone marrow full of sardines and stubbornness. Potent as black garlic. We are all broth-built. Do we make ourselves or…
Review by Jennifer Pons Rebecca Foust’s seventh book of poetry, entitled Only (2022), investigates the fleshy corporeality of woman, mother, and citizen. With accomplished craft, intelligence, and vision, the collection traverses the acts of remembering and reflection, revealing the universalities of what is at stake in the human story. Foust’s poems hover between worlds; they eclipse time and history, risking what is recollected and imagined to speak truth. Ultimately, these poems resonate and ascend as they wrestle with regret, grief, trauma, birth, love, and what is lonely, reaching toward what must ascend in hope when reality is both fact and…
Review by Melissa Ridley Elmes Connie Post’s poetry has been published in over 60 venues including the American Journal of Poetry, Atticus Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Crab Creek Review and Toronto Quarterly. Her first full-length collection, Floodwater, was the winner of the 2014 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press, and her second collection, Prime Meridian, was a finalist in the 2020 Best Book Awards, 2021 International Book Awards and 2020 American Fiction Awards; she has also published two chapbooks. She is the recipient of five prizes for her poetry, including the Crab Creek Review poetry award. Between Twilight, Post’s…
Recent Releases in Poetry and Memoir Mary Buchinger Bodwell, Navigating the Reach. Salmon Poetry, 2023 “How does one learn / to navigate the reach / its treacherous rocks?” asks Mary Buchinger in the title poem of her new collection. The “reach” she refers to is not just a stretch of ocean between islands off coastal Maine. This book is about the churning cross-currents of grief. Buchinger’s poems recount difficult months before and after her father’s death, and take us deep into the inescapable labors of sorrow, memory, and longing. Immersion in the “reach,” however, also reaffirms and deepens the poet’s connection to…
Review by Emily Webber Jessica Jopp’s novel, From the Longing Orchard, is an intimate portrayal of a woman coming of age during the 60’s and 70’s. As the novel opens, Sonya lives in the suburbs of New York with her sister and mother, immersed in her art and rarely leaving her house. From this confined space, the novel bursts with deeply imagined characters. Going back and forth from Sonya’s childhood to the present. Sonya’s memories reveal her family history, her connection to the natural world and her art, and her developing relationship with another woman. Jopp’s writing about the…
Review by Rona Luo Catherine Esposito Prescott’s debut poetry collection Accidental Garden is lush with natural life — raccoons manipulating garden hoses, pelicans crashing into the ocean, drooping palm tree fronds and judgmental peahens. The wildlife of tropical Florida, where Prescott writes from, is ever present, “all of us scattered together on this earth like thrown dice.” Against this backdrop, Accidental Garden, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, meditates on the interconnectedness of life, and the speaker’s impact on even the smallest beings: “Every stomp of my sneaker / mutilates a universe of microbes.” The collection is strongest…
Review by Christy Lee Barnes In her new poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, Heather Lanier examines motherhood, spirituality, and grief. Lanier has previously published two chapbooks and the memoir Raising a Rare Girl. The second poem of the collection, “Free Bible in Your Own Language,” boldly rejects the offer of a free Bible and seems ready to also reject any kind of conventional sacred text, writing: Give me some space, a quiet walk in the grass, unburdened by your kiosk of Korean, Finnish, French…. With my footprints bending the blades, I’ll write a psalm of unknowing, knowing the sun…
Review by Anne Kaier In this splendid series of poems, MaryAnn L. Miller charts the lives of two of her foremothers: her own mother, Mafalda Curzi from Western Pennsylvania and Princess Mafalda of the Italian royal family who died at Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II. On first sight, the two Mafaldas have nothing in common but their name—Italian for strength in battle. Mafalda Curzi was a brilliant woman who interrupted her college education to take a job that would help support her family during the Depression. Mafalda of the House of Savoy was married in “a headdress/fashioned…
Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation Curators/Editors Rachel Neve-Midbar and Jennifer Saunders Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Scholar Andrea Lunsford describes predominant rhetorical features of women’s writing—across centuries—as breaking silence and naming in personal terms. These two features resonated with me as I read Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation, which offers poems, short stories, and personal essays of new writing by women, non-binary, and transgender men. To achieve taboo-shattering power, curators/editors Rachel Neve-Midbar and Jennifer Saunders braided pieces that explore menstruation’s presence and absence across various contexts. The inclusion of writing from diverse voices and experiences makes…