Author: Mom Egg Review

Callie Plaxco Aphasia There are whole days that pass without a single thought taking shape into intelligible words. The wind screams and I think perhaps it is a child waking. But the leaves shake and always there are noises that will sound like children. As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA in Creative Writing. Her chapbook Dear Person is available at Dancing Girl Press and individual poems have appeared in Carve Magazine, Tinderbox, SWWIM and Sugar House…

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Review by Jesse Breite Rediscovering Motherhood: A Review of Lodged in the Belly by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice “I want to see the afterbirth” writes Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice in the opening poem of Lodged in the Belly (Main Street Rag, 2024), the debut collection from longtime Atlanta teacher and Writing Center director. The speaker wants to see what tends to be dismissed in the event of a birth, that biological matter which nurtures the baby before it separates from the mother, also the conduit of genetic inheritance. Dracos-Tice calls the afterbirth an “Amnion mantra ray, filter and feeder” and…

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Review by Deborah Leipziger In a time where we need courage, Linda Carney-Goodrich’s poems help make us brave. In her first collection, Dot Girl, she breaks new ground in her searing poems of redemption and transformation. She takes us by the hand and guides us through her childhood, coming of age in Boston and surviving foster care. In these poems we take flight, move through bracing sea water, experience clouds, amidst violence and abuse. We see the world through the eyes of a child who refuses to be broken; we visit the landmarks of the poet’s childhood, the parks…

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Dayna Patterson Gertrude on arte materna Published in MER 21 Note: The poem is published as an image to preserve formatting. Dayna Patterson is a Thea-curious recovering Mormon, fungophile, macrophotography enthusiast, and textile artist. She’s the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Honors include the Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Award and the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky. Her creative work has appeared recently in EcoTheo, Kenyon Review, and Whale Road Review. “Gertrude on arte materna” was originally published in…

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Review by Melanie McGehee In A Measure of Intelligence, Pepper Stetler journeys through history to discover how and why society has come to define and measure intelligence as we do. She purposes to challenge our thinking, ultimately hoping for a more equitable future for those considered intellectually disabled. What would motivate a Professor of Art History at Miami University to tackle a field of study as different as this one? A mother’s love. Stetler’s daughter Louisa has Down syndrome. In the opening pages, Stetler shares intimate moments. She tells us about her hope filled pregnancy days, joking with her…

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Review by Emily Webber Laura Chow Reeve’s debut story collection, A Small Apocalypse, takes place in the wildness of Florida, following a group of queer friends in mostly interlinked stories as they form bonds with each other, defy expectations, and seek to learn more about themselves. Some stories are outside the bounds of our world and others entirely realist—one story is a packing list for the apocalypse, in one a woman is transforming into a reptile, in another a normal trip to Disney World turns tragic and bizarre. There’s also government-controlled dating, and impending hurricane, pickled memories in jars,…

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Review by Carol Dorf   chigger ridge, the winner of The Word Works: Tenth Gate Prize, chosen by Sandra Lim, is Nicole Callihan’s third full-length poetry collection. Callihan has also published three poetry chapbooks and a novella. This coming of age story set in rural West Virginia locates the mountain in a place where “sometimes it’s better to be hollow/to have nothing is to have nothing to take” (from “mine”). The book is sparse in terms of characters as well. There is the girl, an “old man,” and a boyfriend named “malachi”.  There are also a few passing characters including…

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Review by Jiwon Choi Jen Karetnick’s new poetry collection offers up layers of understanding and wisdom on how to live in our wild and crazy times. The poems that make up Inheritance with a High Error Rate operate in a backdrop of solemn joy that manages to be both profound and delightful. Case in point, meet the octopus who finds a coconut shell in “Play, with Foreign Object” (23): And then it rolled and bounced, propelled by the predictable tide. And the whole sea shuddered with this shred of saturated joy. Karetnick, author of eleven poetry books including…

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Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger Jennifer Case’s second essay collection, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), offers a raw and tender look at birth and motherhood in present-day America. Case exposes the continued problematic expectations of women in heterosexual relationships, while acknowledging biology and unfounded—sometimes, seemingly inexplicable—shame. Case is a professor in Arkansas who has an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD from Binghamton. In the prologue, entitled “Message for the Animal Mother,” Case begins with “You are teats-tingling, hairy line from your pubis to your belly button,…

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Review by Jill Koren Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, Allison Blevins’s fifth full-length book, Where Will We Live if The House Burns Down? (Persea Books, 2024) certainly does its work in honoring the “playful love of language” and “fierce conscience” Rudnitsky’s own poems exhibit. Blevins, also the author of five chapbooks, extends her canon of works examining the inexpressible experience of living in a body in pain, a house on fire, among other bodies who burn and circle: “because there are the children. Always the children” (3). While motherhood is certainly a recurring theme in…

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