Review by Mary Ellen Talley Kate Reavey brings a sense of the circularity of seasons and motherhood in CURVE, her first full length poetry collection. The five sections of free verse encompass an arc of personal experiences: motherhood, parenting, family life, cancer, and losing parents. Metaphorical and actual curves suggest a lyrical ebb and flow within an ocean of language and the natural world. Desire for pregnancy begins the book. The first poem, “My mother’s nipples,” sets out with a heartfelt wish, “I ask for stretch marks / silver as the hairs across / my mother’s brow.” Children arrive…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Gabby Gilliam In her captivating debut poetry collection, Ellis Elliot delves into the multifaceted role of mothering. In her poem “Anthem”, she writes “This is about every mother, everywhere, and the dreadful dark we find ourselves in sometimes,”(57) setting the tone for a compilation that gracefully weaves together themes of trauma and recovery, conflict and acceptance. The initial part of the collection revolves around Elliott’s stepson, who has special needs. Through her poems, she artfully captures moments of profound connection and pays meticulous attention to detail, provoking the reader to stop and reflect. Each poem serves as…
Review by Melanie McGehee a petit mal, the debut nonfiction work of visual artist and poet Ana Maria Caballero was awarded The Black Spring Press Group’s International Beverly Prize and was a finalist for AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize. A memoir documenting a mother’s journey towards a diagnosis for her young son’s seizures, it defies structural norms. Caballero’s unique stream of consciousness captures multi-tasking spirit that is familiar to any mother, grammar rules be damned. In its first sentences, we are promised a “disruptive” presentation. I will give you a hint: the “key” provided at the beginning of the book…
Review by Angela Williamson Emmert Minnesota poet Jennifer Manthey opens her award-winning, debut collection The Fight not with conflict but with an unexpected, though fraught, agreement. “U.S. Embassy, Kinshasa, DRC” describes the process of an overseas adoption through a series of minor actions, each of them shaped by colonialism and determined by race. Black men hold doors while White men occupy offices; Black women “[speak] their answers” while White women “play the part […] dutiful and quiet.” Then with a startling, biting clarity the poem concludes: “At the end / of the afternoon we leave with their babies” (11).…
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader LaToya Jordan has many illustrious writing credits, including a piece in Mom Egg Review 13; several are devoted to the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, and she writes across several genres. To the Woman in the Pink Hat is a worthy addition to these topics, and in a speculative-fiction vein. Published by Aqueduct Press, her novella is Vol. 87 in their Conversation Series, a collection of short works of, or about, feminist science-fiction. The press prides itself on bringing “challenging” texts to “demanding readers”: Jordan’s entry fulfills these objectives. The challenging and demanding…
An Interview with Debut Memoirists Lauren Kay Johnson and Paige Towers Interview by Emily Avery-Miller The Fine Art of Camouflage by Lauren Kay Johnson is a debut memoir that explores what it means to be a woman in a war zone, to be a parent or child in a military family, and how the stories we tell can both expose and obscure the realities of the power and trauma of war. I ache for the woman who [jumped] right back into the flurry of Wife, Mother, Cook-to-order Chef, Taxi Driver, Schedule Master, Center of Gravity . . .…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Jennifer Jean’s new collection of poems, a powerful memoir of both dispirited and defiant vignettes, captures the wistful journey of seeking connection to one’s origins, obtaining a sense of belonging, and enduring the emotional dissonance of the disenfranchised in a promised land of perfect families and glittering landscapes. Jean’s personal narratives—many encompassing the pain of an early life without family stability– interwoven with societal messages of ferocious cheerfulness– are summoned by what she terms “saturations”—the ekphrastic summoning of intimate episodes from an immersion into musical selections (popular tunes that are listed with notes in the…
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…
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,…