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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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,…
Review by Jennifer Martelli In the Sophocles tragedy, the character of Antigone (daughter of blinded and exiled Oedipus) was the victim of state-sponsored violence. Entombed alive after defying King Creon’s order not to bury her brother, Eteocles, she became a symbol of resistance and betrayal and also, of a love that would not be extinguished. Jennifer Franklin’s latest collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, weaves this ancient story with sonnets and prose poems. The structure she builds is both organic and unbreakable. In “As Antigone—,” she writes It was deliberate.…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Amy Barone’s latest collection of poetry, Defying Extinction, she delves into the environment, the natural world, family, grief, and growth. She affords each topic considerable care. Divided into five sections, the volume shows how personal yet how mysterious the world can be. Barone balances ecocritical commentary and existentialism in invitingly gorgeous poems. The first section of the book is entitled “Sacred Places,” and most of the poems feature specific locales throughout the world—the Americas, Europe, and Africa—as well as celestial bodies. And as well as the animals and lands, Barone showcases the peoples…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor In this eighth collection by Alison Stone, the poet moves through the history of recent years, including the pandemic, protests, racial and economic inequities and their historical context. These are poems that do not avoid questions, even ones with no clear answer. The collection opens with a taut poem that covers pandemic denial, power disparity, and Jews turned away at Ellis Island. The poet asks, “What does it mean/to be American?” (13). This poem sets up a weaving of the past and present that runs throughout the collection. Death and politics intermingle. “…what rises/from…