Review by Emily Webber In Zoe Ballering’s short story collection, There Is Only Us, each of the eight speculative fiction stories is surprising, funny, and thought-provoking. In stories spread across time—biblical times, pandemic times, future worlds—Ballering’s characters often face a frightening unknown trying to stave off loneliness, figure out where to stake their beliefs, and deal the connections that endure regardless of how much chaos the world spins up around us. In two stories, “Ark” and “Luz Luz,” the characters face God’s wrath. In “Luz Luz,” God starts to disappear everyday objects in retaliation for how humans have treated…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jennifer Martelli Elizabeth Strauss Friedman writes in her title, “Lost Positive (Centaurus Constellation—Centaur),” Untamed| As women ought to be, life outside male invalidation advertently galloping into stardust. In her latest collection, The Lost Positive, Constellation Poems, Strauss Friedman creates a night sky, a cosmology of star clusters in four sections that tells the story of the “Chained Woman,” “Strongmen who fancy themselves gods,” “Men’s Tools,” and finally, “Beasts.” These constellations have always reflected the myths we’ve been taught; here, they are given voice through astronomy and poetry, and shine with a contemporary light. Strauss Friedman’s use of…
Review by Hester L. Furey Nicole Callihan’s new book This Strange Garment delivers a stunning sequence of poems about the experience of breast cancer. A survivor myself, I selected the book for the theme, remembering Audre Lorde’s insistence that “cancer is political.” Very quickly, however, the reading of it took me away from familiar generalizations and far out to an unknown sea. In forty-three poems the book bodies forth the manifold strange and alien forms of a truth expressed in a seed sentence, “this is my temporary body.” The first poem is called “Everything is Temporary”; the last poem…
Review by Sherre Vernon Lisa C. Taylor is the author of two collections of short fiction, Impossibly Small Spaces (Arlen House, 2018) and Growing a New Tail (Arlen House, 2015), as well as five collections of poetry including Interrogation of Morning (Arlen House, 2022), and The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House, 2011) written collaboratively with Geraldine Mills. Near the start of Interrogation of Morning, Taylor’s speaker implores, “Help me finish this poem” (“Poem as Dreamer Requests Help” 29), and it is this invitation that carries me through to the title poem, fifty pages later. When the speaker says,…
Say hello to our 21st annual issue! MER – Mom Egg Review Vol. 21 Order your copy here: Print Issue – $18 ($15 with coupon code “COMMUNITY”) PDF Copy – $5 MER – MOM EGG REVIEW Vol. 21 – 2023 Editor-in-Chief Marjorie Tesser Poetry Editors Jennifer Martelli Cindy Veach Prose Co-Editor J.L. Scott Contributors: Deborah Bacharach, Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Jennifer Barber, Carrie Bennett, Margo Berdeshevsky, Lisa Creech Bledsoe, Mary Bonina, Mary Lou Buschi, Kevin Carey, Robert Carr, M.P. Carver, Sofia Chapman, Eileen Cleary, Ashley W. Cundiff, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Ariane Dreyfus, Merridawn Duckler, Suzanne Edison, Jennifer R. Edwards, Kelley…
Review by Jennifer Martelli I’ve come to love the epistolary form, which is defined as literary work that reads as a letter or letters. Relationships are laid out on a surgeon’s table, emotions revealed through the mechanisms of the letter. We are allowed into the body of the letter through the salutation: why this is being written and to whom, how the sender ends the epistle. This ancient form has been passed down and used as a literary tool, from Emily Dickinson to Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters. Two horror gothic novels stand out as examples of…
Review by Jane Ward In Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, award-winning short story writer and poet Carla Panciera presents a deeply moving collection of nineteen standalone stories that, read as a whole, pay tribute to the years she spent with her father, Aldo, working his family’s dairy farm in Westerly, Rhode Island. These tales of the farm and its historied beginnings from three Holsteins and a legendary bull named Osborndale Ivanhoe feel intimate, almost conversational. As Panciera writes in the introduction to the collection: For three decades, I returned to a place that exists only in memory. As…
Review by Michelle Panik Splashed on the cover of Everything’s Changing is a woman in glamorous sunglasses and a headwrap à la Jackie O, her figure a 3-D image edged with bright colors. And, indeed, the people within Chelsea Stickle’s flash fiction are photorealistic. Firmly entrenched in magical realism that bends both whimsical and darkly cautionary, place figures largely into the stories. Many are set in close communities—in one, a neighborhood is overrun by vandalizing peacocks; in another, people shoot cardinals in the desperate hope that they will bring good fortune. And while Stickle’s landscapes are richly imaginative, it’s…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Dragonfly Morning, consisting of twenty poems, heavily illustrated over its fifty one pages by both Eihmane and Bridget Irving, put out by Being Books, is a wonderful follow up to Eihmane’s recent chapbook, One Day at the Taiwan Land Museum. Eihmane, a transplant to Taiwan from her native Latvia, pulls in the big-lunged breaths of someone in a new land who finds more of herself as she integrates the beauty, objects, and sensibilities of a place into her way of being. The way a new context energizes, sharpens, and informs the senses is especially…
MER 21 Launch Reading to take place Sunday, May 21st at the Jefferson Market Library in NYC.