Review by Celia Jeffries The phone that doesn’t ring in this memoir is the one that should be connecting Lara Lillibridge to her father. The father who moved to Alaska when she was four, forcing her to chase after him, “flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket, beg him to look at me.” (13) Subtitled “Essays on Yearning”, Lillibridge explores the edges of responsibility and self-preservation in a mosaic pattern, adjoining long-form essays with searing vignettes from the life she lived in response to his abandonment, intersecting poetry, braided…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Melissa Ridley Elmes Sherre Vernon’s work has appeared in over 100 venues including The Chestnut Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Westchester Review. Following her 2006 hybrid postmodern novella Green Ink Wings, which was the winning manuscript of the 2005 Elixir Press Chapbook Competition, and 2007 chapbook The Name is Perilous, this first full-length collection, Flame Nebula, Bright Nova, is centered on the journey from childhood to motherhood, tackling the topics of emotional trauma and mother-daughter relationships. Organized into four sections (“Flame Nebula,” “What Is Flammable,” “Gravity,” and “Bright Nova”), the collection’s 45 poems range in form from…
New fiction, both novels and short stories, memoir, and poetry. Eileen Vorbach Collins, Love in the Archives, Apprentice House 11/23, nonfiction (suicide). Eileen Vorbach Collins’s Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, is a collection of linked narrative essays weaving themes of child loss, suicide, interfaith marriage and the natural world. Many of the essays have been previously published. Two were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The book has received a Pencraft Best Book Award, and is a finalist for the Story Circle Network’s Sarton Award and a Forward Indies Award. “In prose as clear…
Julie Cyr Leda in the Gulf after the painting by Adam Miller When Deepwater Horizon exploded, Leda’s baby latched on as the waves became slick, the film refracting light into a false rainbow. Leda sat naked on a rock while the swan died, oil cleaving to feathers as pollen clings in spring. The arrogance of looking for the love of your life, adrift. Leda looks in the smallest places – the shell of a hermit crab or under a pebble, the vast places taken up by spillage and underwater plumes. Leda sat and nursed her baby until her milk ran…
A Literary Reflection by Wendy BooydeGraaff on Kiss the Ground, a Netflix Documentary and Soil: The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy I began watching Kiss the Ground with my spouse, with whom I’ve gardened the twenty- plus years we’ve had a yard. Throughout those years, we’ve discussed cover crop and lawn fertilizer, no-mow May and native plants, all with varying levels of successful implementation in our backyard on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, Michigan, success being measured on a gradient scale of growing only weeds to producing lush, edible tomatoes and sundry vegetables. So it…
Seeing Our Children in Art: on “The Stone Boat” in Kelly McMasters’s The Leaving Season A Literary Reflection by Anna Rollins Recently, I archived photos of my children’s faces from my public social media accounts. I’d always given thought to how I posted their images for anyone’s access. I made some rules (that I occasionally broke): only post older photos so that their immediate identities are not apparent. Try to mask their features with averted eyes or masks. I was not sure what influenced these guidelines. I was also uncertain of my motivation in making them. Did I fear an outside…
Splinters by Leslie Jamison You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz Review by Denise Napoli Long It’s called Divorce Memoir, but there ought to be a subcategory, Divorce Mom Memoir, and a sub-sub category: Divorce Writer Mom Memoir. That’s because the stories of mothers are not the same as non-parents’ stories, or fathers’ stories. They can’t be. The questions facing mothers navigating divorce are unique, and even more so for moms who are professional writers. The battle line between what is work and what is not, what deserves compensation and…
Review by Carla Panciera L’Air du Temps is the name of a perfume and the title of Diane Josefowicz newest book, the first in a proposed trilogy. (Josefowicz’s debut novel is Ready, Set, Oh, also set in her home state of Rhode Island). This is a beautifully written book, a clinic on how to pare down writing to its essentials. Each brief chapter, carefully crafted sentence, pinpoint perfect detail, is evidence of a writer who understands exactly what a scene needs to resonate with a reader. Translated, the book’s title loosely means the current fashion, but thirteen year old…
Review by Suzette Bishop Miriam Levine’s Forget about Sleep, the 2023 winner of The Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, stays with you, unguarded, blooming, fragrant, rustling. Life on Earth is paradise. And it isn’t paradise. What do we do with that? Levine’s exquisite poem-blooms from the later stages of life answer that Eden’s promise isn’t artifice. There’s a chance to see, be seen fully, and see ourselves, “the lightest web of possibility / that I too may be seen clearly.” Levine admits loving “bodily things,” grounded by home, place, literature, art, garden, and the objects she loves. The physical…
Review by Sharon Tracey Fabulosa—the second poetry collection by Karen Rigby—lives up to its title, propelled by a sensory rush of cinematic color as the poet pulls us through poems as vivid as paintings, as physical as putting on a dress or taking a breath. And a poetry collection that opens with “Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves” has my attention from the get-go. Rigby lets us know that they’ll be arriving “wearing satin or suede to haunt you when they leave / no trace” (1). She also cleverly inserts small clues in the first poem that become…