DeMisty D. Bellinger On Raising Black Kids in a new century when the civil rights movement seemed ages ago and one, learning about the Rev. Dr. King, asks me if Grandma is Black and yes, I say, she is and that one asks if I am Black I say yes, I am, then she reads, her five or six year old self, more about the Rev. Dr. King in her made-for-kids biography of the man who fought for Black folks’ rights and working people’s rights and rights of women and rights of all asks Mama, am I Black? Well,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Alise Alousi I Am Not Your Mother after reading “Whose Mother is Nature Anyway?” Annabel Kennan, Hyperallergic November 2022 I am not your mother. I can’t carry you along the eroding beach nor across the dirtied river. I am not the lush landscape, not bird song you capture on your phone, you can’t come home broken. You thought you heard a whale, a wail, a wailing. Assumed a woman’s voice, stance to view the mess. I am not the domestic trope remember the long rope how you would say many hands make light work then drop everything sail back…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen Millicent Borges Accardi’s Quarantine Highway is an exploration of human beings finding new ways to be together in the midst of a pandemic. Her poems encompass relationships as well as separations and borders, and what we have found out about ourselves. In Accardi’s superb poetic voice, she invites the reader to reflect on what it means to be together while simultaneously being apart from others. Much like a highway, the poems invariably direct us toward something. Whether that something is positive or not, is entirely up to all of us. But the warning is…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Wendy Drexler’s latest collection of poems, Notes from the Column of Memory, addresses the bewilderment and wonder involved in aging. Inspired by Donna Conklin King’s sculpture of the same name, the title poem opens, “See how time breaks us/and still we stand/among the flutings.” Shaped like a column, with its short, centered lines that widen at the base, and itself broken into two parts (part one in the book’s first section, part two in its last), the poem invites us to see “your own face, fractured/but reclaimed, called back/to your history and your home.” This…
Review by Laura Dennis The soundtrack is sometimes James Taylor, sometimes Nirvana. The flavors are Hot Fries and Moon Pies, consumed by middle school girls dressed in thrift-store grunge. Smells of pine and drying tobacco mingle with teenage sweat and Strawberry VO5. We are in Pitt County, North Carolina, mostly in the 1990s, but also in the distant past and the present day, following a girl-turned-woman upon whom four years in the coastal south have left an indelible mark that some might call a scar. Although the time in question lies just outside the so-called formative years, form is…
Elisabeth Weiss Detention Camp Children skateboard into the sweetness of what cannot last. Rachmanes derives from the word for womb. That little violet face shut in a cage. Palms grow hard in a border town where everyone is afraid. I would say drumroll, please and bring it on and exuberance is beauty but hazy-like in the scorching searchlights one day pushes into another. Under silver blankets children cry for their mothers. Rising temperatures hit in waves. Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to…
Jenn Givhan Apples Fall We ride into the orchard at the edge of town my children on hay bales beside me, bumping along. What does it mean to fall, my daughter has asked me for a poem she must write. In the rows of the orchard, we muse upon orchard versus grove, which we looked up while homeschooling, although we can’t recall the difference now, something to do with purpose, the wildness, not citrus as I’d thought. The fallen apples squish into muddy grass, mushing and reeking of cider, already fermenting. A lurch in my gut at the scent…
Ingrid Andersson Nova Stella I knew from the out-of-the-blue lull that can befall hard labor, bestowing sleep, that she was fully dilated: I pronounced her complete. The woman roused, turned dilated eyes to me and said—with blinding depth and more love than I have ever seen— No one ever told me that before, and reaching down through a burst and flash of milky caul, caught a daughter. Originally published in MER 20 As a practicing midwife, Ingrid Andersson feels privileged to work daily within a world of heroic Mother Figures. Her poetry has been…
Review by Olivia Kate Cerrone The title poem of Jennifer Martelli’s brilliant new chapbook, All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes invokes Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, where supernatural transformations involve women ensnared in patriarchal violence. In the aforementioned piece, the speaker reimagines her silverware as Each fork was a woman once, punished or saved: all metal, straight up at the sight of the god who turned her: the oyster fork was proud, the beetroot nearly raped (kept her maidenhead) and the dinner forks lying one on top of the other, settled for mediocrity. Similar transformations pervade throughout other poems,…