Review by Carole Mertz William Carlos Williams wrote in Spring and All (in 1923) that the heavy process of creating anew “begins to near a new day.” Of all the volumes mothers have written about their children and their experiences of motherhood, Marie Gauthier, with Leave No Wake, proves it is yet possible to share new thought and new creativity about this profound and universal experience, that of the parent who parents responsibly and lovingly. In creativity “everything IS new,” Williams further states. Gauthier’s syntax, and her genuine sentiment towards mothering, makes things new. Many of the poems in…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Ruth Hoberman Mary Morris’s most recent book of poems—her third—draws its title from Rembrandt’s “late self-portraits”—three paintings he did in the years preceding his 1669 death at the age of 63. At the time, he had lost his wife, his beloved son Titus, and his money. The suffering is evident in Rembrandt’s face, but for many, the paintings also depict an inner light, a sense that he is on the brink not of death but transfiguration. Others see the portraits in less uplifting terms, as studies in bodily decay, with their sad eyes, wrinkled, blemished skin, the…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Colleen Michaels invites us into a world of sweet, fatty foods, illusion, and games of chance, where we might land at Foxwoods Casino, Paragon Park, Coney Island, or perhaps, a local bakery to buy blueberry donuts. The poems in Michaels’ debut collection, Prize Wheel, are as thrilling and dangerous as a carnival. Fanned out into six sections, the book is as breathtaking and as specific as fate; the poems guide us through and out of a funhouse maze, one filled with creativity, costume, danger, and a mother’s love. The first section, “Beat the House,” introduces…
Chelsea Fanning Virgin Mary as Teakettle Praise be to you, spattered with chicken grease and garlic fat, the cerulean of your enamel like a blue mantle, sanguine in its austerity. Down your throat holy faucet waters pour, impregnating your belly before you’re cast into the flames. Blue light caresses your sides heats up the sea inside you, tempest waves rising to a fever until you scream in ecstasy or terror. Originally published in MER 20, “Mother Figures” issue. Chelsea Fanning is a writer, poet, editor, feminist, witch from New Jersey. She has an MFA from Drew University…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Winner of the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Flutter, Kick is a taut new collection that vaults between a Zenlike focus on moments, and meanderings that alter what is seen. Divided into four sections, the collection opens with the poem House. This poem twists its way from a memory to the history of a house where …”someone attached a lock/on her bedroom door and didn’t say why…” (p. 11) Like many of the poems that follow, the first section sets up a dark history of a place attached to a childhood memory. In some poems,…
THE YELLOW TOOTHBRUSH Kathryn Gahl interviewed by Leslie Lindsay What does a mother do the day after she visits her daughter in prison? How does a mother reconcile—find compassion—for a person who is guilty of the unthinkable? What if that daughter, like you, is also a nurse, a mother reeling from abandonment by her husband and her father, what then? What if that daughter, when struck by the perils of perinatal mood disorder, committed filicide? For award-winning, multi-genre writer Kathryn Gahl, these aren’t questions to be taken lightly. Forgiving and loving aren’t options, they are ‘built-in.’ The Yellow Toothbrush…
Review by Yvonne Higgins Leach Katy Ellis’ book-length prose poem Home Water, Home Land has all the ingredients that make for an engaging read: inspiring settings, unexpected turns, and character growth. I read the book in one sitting, turning each page to keep learning more about the narrator’s journey of breaking away, of experiencing new borders of land and water, new relationships, and questioning what she truly desires. I read each page relishing the beautiful language, the poetry of life. The book is written as an entire prose poem. At first that can seem overwhelming, but Ellis organized it…
Review by Olivia Kate Cerrone In the title poem that opens Julia Lisella’s latest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, the lived life that was once familiar is “now broken into village plots that others love to visit.” Reshaped by grief, memories take on new associations, evoking startling possibilities and insights in a narrative terrain where “almost anything can grow here—even last year’s annuals come shunting through with a tiny roar.” Lisella’s elegant and vividly rendered poems are wise, compassionate, and far-reaching in their scope, interweaving haunting themes on what is endured and sustained through seasons of motherhood and marriage, beloved…
Reborn of Secrets and Teeth: A Review of Kimberly Ann Priest’s Slaughter the One Bird by Jessica L. Walsh There will be diseased houses, God tells Moses and Aaron in Leviticus, before recounting to them the complex steps needed to purify a dwelling. When a priest finally deems the house clean, he will sanctify it through the ritual of two birds: slaughter the first bird over a vessel, dip the living bird in its blood, and cast the blood through the house seven times. Thus, in the story of the two birds, one does indeed survive—but does so awash in…