Review by Kate Lewis With Body, Nina B. Lichtenstein Explores the Physical Contours of Self Navigating through explorations of a body allow author Nina B. Lichtenstein’s memoir, Body: My Life In Parts, to bring together the entirety of her life as she lived it: viscerally, with teeth, and belly, and breasts, and back – as well as how the breakdown of those parts can often bring us to our literal knees. The book traces her life and uncovers the deeper meaning that some of these parts of her brought to the whole. An incident with a bit of…
Author: Mom Egg Review
An Interview with Jocelyn Jane Cox, Author of Motion Dazzle, a Memoir of Motherhood, Loss and Skating on Thin Ice. Interview by Sara Weiss In her debut memoir Motion Dazzle, former competitive figure skater and coach Jocelyn Jane Cox reflects on the deep bond between herself and her mother. She explores a childhood defined by the rigorous demands of training on the ice along with years of sporadic pain and injury, and the sacrifices her mother made to support this pursuit. The book also speaks to “the sandwich generation,” as she recounts the paradox of becoming a new mother…
MER Bookshelf – August 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Suzanne Kamata, River of Dolls and Other Stories, Penguin Random House SEA, January 2025, literary fiction (short stories) These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales and lore, explore the lives of individuals caught between desire and duty, as well as the conflicting expectations of different cultures. For example, in “Day Pass,” a college student in South Carolina befriends a female prisoner on a work release program, thinking that she will be a good influence, but then realizes that she has gotten in over her head.…
Review by Rebecca Jane Mothersalt shines a light on moments of awe, ambivalence, disorientation, surprise, and power that arise with pregnancy, labor, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caring for babies. These poems reveal a woman aligning her Mother identity with that of the Writer, the Japanese American, the Friend, the Patient, the Lover of language, and the Guardian of memories. These poems reveal the mind as a source of keen attentiveness that wrests the telling details and underscores life’s complicated plexus of pain and joy. “Labor is a temple with many faces” (25). Along the way, we pause to hear the…
Review by Geri Lipschultz Emotionally and thematically resonant, Barbara Henning’s thirteenth book is a slim volume of sixty-nine entries, quasi-biographical and quasi-epistolary in nature. Even the title reflects a quality of compression and intimacy that characterizes these entries: “Girlfriend,” without the “s,” honors a feeling of one-ness that emerges, despite the number of seemingly disparate stories, each not even a full page, but poignant and startling, not to mention deftly crafted in a manner that does not call attention to the writing itself. Henning began this project in the nineties but had to put it off for the…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron In “A Safe Haven for Writers,” the fifth story in Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut collection, This Isn’t Fun Anymore, the narrator enrolls in a writing retreat. While there, she intends to show her husband that she’s capable of meeting her own needs, and work on “a collection of domestic horror stories. Stories of what’s just beneath the surface” (71). Before reading Micka-Foos’s book, the “domestic horror” genre was not on my radar. But as soon as I saw that phrase, I realized I’d just finished four stories falling squarely within its contours. This Isn’t Fun Anymore…
Monster Galaxy by Cindy Veach Review by Ruth Hoberman On the cover of Monster Galaxy, Cindy Veach’s new book of poems, Athena glows in gold armor, having sprung powerful and fully formed from her father Zeus’s forehead. The poems in Monster Galaxy are similarly powerful, fully formed, and haunted by the elusive father whose tastes and demands shaped the poet’s childhood. Paranoid, overprotective, at times sexist—he’s a flawed husband and father but loved, and his death leaves the speaker stunned by his absence. “I don’t know how it happens that a big man,/a man so present,/lies down and…
Donna Vorreyer MAKING TEA, I REMEMBER A LONG AGO SUMMER Honey hanging from the thickened dipper becomes a stream of spit from my teasing brother’s mouth, summer heat and hose water shimmering the scene becomes my mother’s favorite scrimshaw pendant swinging as she leans down to separate us with her smile and half-hum This is the hinge of memory: a slim wooden stick becoming the paddle of a canoe to row me across the brain lake and into the reeds, singing a hosanna: what was still is and will always be sweet Donna Vorreyer is the author…
Sarah Lightman – “Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully” “Biblical Women Ageing Disgracefully,” paintings by Sarah Lightman, is showing in the UK at Chester Visual Arts in July. Lightman explains that these are “…paintings…of familiar figures, once painted by ‘masters’ of Western art, and trapped in scenes from my own life: Bathsheba is tired of the dishes; Eve’s lost in the pile of laundry; Mary struggles with parenting and experiences an unexpected perimenopausal bleed on holiday. In this exhibition of carefully observed watercolour paintings, I plait religion, humour, and satire to spotlight women’s lives, struggles, and ageing bodies.” Featured Paintings…