Watch our 2023 MER vol. 21 Launch Reading on our YouTube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NZUhEtQgII&t=1097s
Author: Mom Egg Review
MER Online Quarterly – June 2023 MER Literary Folios Parent (verb) Mixed genre literary and art folio on parenting in action, curated by MER editors. Words: Ambriel Floyd Bostic, James Callan, Alisa Childress, Hayes Davis, Ashley Espinoza, Jennifer Furner, Mike Gray, Francesca Leader, Elizabeth O’Rourke, Ellen June Wright Art: Sally Brown, Sofia Chapman, Rachael Grad The Little Things Mixed genre literary folio on joy and humor in motherhood, curated by J. L. Scott Featured writers: Annie Marhefka, Ashley Knowlton, Margo DeBiasio, Cassie Mannes-Murray, Alexandria Faulkenbury , Jennifer Hernandez, Bethany Jarmul, Marin Smith, Melanie Faranello, Anjali Vaidya MER Books…
Parent (verb): to be or act as a parent. Words Ambriel Floyd Bostic James Callan Alisa Childress Hayes Davis Ashley Espinoza Jennifer Furner Mike Gray Francesca Leader Elizabeth O’Rourke Ellen June Wright Art Sally Brown Sofia Chapman Rachael Grad Parent (verb) Rachael Grad – “Mommy Mayhem – Elephant and Doll” Sofia Chapman, “Look After Baby” Sally Brown, “Art Time Mama Rainbow” Artist Bios A mom of three, Rachael Grad left practicing law to study painting full-time at the New York Studio School and New York University before transferring to OCAD…
Literary Folio Curated by J.L. Scott The phrase “the joy of motherhood” has become somewhat trite, full of connotations held over from a time when nobody was willing to admit that not all of motherhood is, in fact, joyful. I started to wonder where the joy in being a mother actually is. We all, of course, love our kiddos, but to find true joy in all the muck of school and athletics and doctors’ appointments and diaper changes and meltdowns? That I wondered about. Looking at my own life, I started to see a pattern. Yes, there were the…
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…
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…