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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
MOTHER FOLK: Folktales, Wisdom, and Lore in Motherhood MER Mixed Genre Folio Curated by DeMisty Bellinger Featuring M.A.M.A. Issue 53 Featuring Dayna Patterson, Poetry, and Jessica Caldas, Art
Lisa Ampleman Unremarkable My deepest sadnesses are completely ordinary. Not the predicament of roundworms as the shuttle Columbia, making its way homeward, is eaten through by heated plasma, leaving their thermos falling solo through the stratosphere. No word can capture that experience, but so many lose a pregnancy that there’s a name for their children born later: rainbow babies. The phrase harnesses the mythology of a watery disaster, a promise of future safety. I kept thinking my sorrow was something special, but it was extraordinarily common. The star-scar in my navel where they…
Nicole Brooks The Mother Speaks I shrink to a diamond My daughter palms. I’m squat As the littlest Russian doll. She relishes my dispersion Of light, holds me to the Morning sun. Secures me In a golden ring’s claws, Bands her broken love Vein, marrying my pain. I Weigh on her hand. She Springs me from the prongs, Clicks me into a locket Worn against her chest. It is too much. She hot glues me To a magnet. A day of Holding coupons Fast to the fridge — She sees it is wrong. Places me in the Black Forest…
Susan Calvillo Urban Legend I don’t make love, orgasm, or stimulate my nipples forget about cuddle napping, doing yoga, or cat cow poses I don’t practice labor positions with squats, lunges, or deep pliés I refuse to sit upright on the couch, in bed, at the table, or anywhere really I don’t pace, or vacuum, or decorate the babies’ room while watching my favorite amateur baking show (Just Desserts) all to keep those buns in the oven longer… no—I am the laziest self I can imagine don’t tell me they are old wives’ tales don’t make a myth…
Olivia Cronk excerpt from “Mothering as Archive as Textural Surface” With Visual Art by Anne Zielenski Fleming A Quipu That Remembers Nothing consisted of [Cecilia Vicuña’s] act of thinking about a quipu—the knotted cord method of communication used by Andean peoples beginning around 3000 BCE . . . there are no material remains . . . of Vicuña’s imagined quipu, aside from her recounting her thought to others and writing about it as a little note after the fact. This “mental thread” stretched from her mouth to this page like an oral history, told first to herself and then…
Jamie Etheridge We are (not) fish tales She can’t breathe and I can’t breathe because we are underwater. Only she has no gills and I have no fins and we are not fish. This is not a fairytale. Not a folk tale. Not a story at all. My girl is a baby with ocean skin. A toddler with bangs that swim into her amber eyes and a laugh that plunges the epipelagic zone. Arms outstretched, legs kicking, her body tunnels through the colors of the sea: aqua, turquoise, drowned, indigo. She is a child of prismatic light. Then one…