A History More Complete – Suzanne Frischkorn’s Fixed Star (JackLeg Press 2022) Reviewed by Sunni Brown Wilkinson How do we understand the self? Such work is both an uncovering and an inventing, a mixture of history and imagination, an exploration of heritage and a discovery of how one chooses to approach the world. This theme, of the fraught nature of identity, is explored throughout Suzanne Frischkorn’s newest collection Fixed Star. The speaker in these poems asks, What does it mean to disappear? To lose the little sea inside you? The poem “What It Means to Be a Cuban-Hyphenated”…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Much to the credit of Jessica E. Johnson’s full-length poetry book, Metabolics, published by Acre Books, I couldn’t read it at all until I managed to still my frenetic end-of-year energy. Caught in the throes of the family/work juggle and holiday preparations, I couldn’t quite catch onto the words. It wasn’t until after the new year, when I caught a cold, that I finally felt quiet enough to sit down and give over my real attention to this slender, beautiful, thought-provoking volume. At that point, I read it all in one go with great…
Review by Jamie Wendt In her new collection of poems, Crow Funeral, Kate Hanson Foster writes about the beauty and stresses of motherhood. The book begins with the title poem “Crow Funeral,” which sets a melancholy tone for the collection and introduces a superstition of keeping children out of danger, which will carry on throughout the book. The death of a crow coincides with the downing of an airplane that remains unfound without any answers about its crash and disappearance. Questions about God’s existence and involvement arise, which the poet returns to again and again throughout the book as…
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack In Leaving Paradise, Gail Thomas writes about the natural world, climate change, her dog, her partner, seasons, dementia, Bethlehem Steel and being a mother, daughter and grandmother. She engages her subjects with extraordinary attention, precision, grace and love. Many of the poems in this volume are lyrical narratives. Thomas creates emotional effect through stories, and complex emotions are deeply woven within. “Alchemy” tells the story of four generations of women through food. Great-granddaughter devours platters of meatballs from a recipe three generations old. You feel at home in this kitchen, among delectables musically rendered in…
Maria Mazziotti Gillan Snow Falls Thick outside the windows of Saint Marguerite retreat house. If only my mother had not died more than 20 years ago, I’d call her, tell her, my practical, no-nonsense mother, to stop working long enough to look out into the softening December world, here in this peaceful place where no sound enters. Memory, that savvy Trickster, pulls me back to the 17th Street kitchen with its coal stove and sweet, bread-baking aroma. It is 1947. We are having a huge blizzard and all the windows in our apartment frost over in patterns that…
Review by Marjorie Tesser Little Astronaut, J. Hope Stein’s book of poetry, channels experiences, emotions, and perspectives of early motherhood. The slim, elegant hardcover features a pleasing illustration of mother and baby sketched in white on an inky background. The book’s five sections contain poems that range from the speaker’s pregnancy to the era of her child’s toddlerhood, a span of three or so years. The poems are mostly free verse and prose poems. The variety of line length and poem shape makes the book visually appealing. The tone is often conversational, and the frankness and freshness of the…
Review by Michelle Panik Collaboration in any artistic medium—literary, visual, performative—can seem both intuitive and misguided. On one hand, creativity begets creativity, and so artists merging their ideas could seem natural. But on the other hand, artists pursue things they’re passionate about, and having such endeavors knock up against each other can be problematic. But collaboration worked for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, it worked for The Roches, and it works for Sydell Rosenberg and Amy Losak. Wing Strokes Haiku contains 44 poems that are arranged two to a page in what I like to call haiku “couplets” (not to…
Review by Emily Webber Tara Lynn Masih’s How We Disappear is a collection of twelve stories and a novella all with a strong connection to the natural world and characters who are recreating their own worlds. Masih’s characters are either trying to disappear into something new or afraid they will disappear. The stories take the reader to different environments and time periods including Utah, France, Belgium, and Puerto Rico, all richly detailed landscapes and with complex characters equally as interesting as the places they inhabit. These stories tell us what happens when we look away from our current…
Review by Sherre Vernon Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry including Imperfect Present. She is a translator, an essayist, and a teacher—the poet who won the 2012 AWP Donald Hall Prize for her collection Burn and Dodge. Dolin was a 2021 NEA Fellowship recipient, a Pushcart Prize winner, and a Fulbright Scholar. She serves as an associate editor for Barrow Street Press. In Imperfect Present, Dolin merges her skills as a translator and poet. This is a collection that aptly captures the plurality of meaning present in the mind of anyone who skips in and…
Review by Laura Dennis Sometimes literature creates what can only be described as either a disquieting comfort or a comforting disquiet. The comfort comes from the recognition of shared feelings and experiences, the disquiet from the nature of what is shared. Such was my experience reading former Cincinnati Poet Laureate Pauletta Hansel’s latest poetry collection, Heartbreak Tree. Published in 2022, the volume contains pieces which were clearly written during or after COVID lockdown, a time of fearful introspection that for some creatives seems to have yielded extraordinary if unsettling fruit. At least this is how I imagine the genesis…