Review by Anna Laura Reeve Kirsten Shu-ying Chen’s impressive debut centers her experience caring for her dying mother, and the established structures and systems that erode under the influence of that grief. These poems exist in a liminal space, functioning both as the small light of human perception glowing in a universe of dark matter and as an eye, pupil dilating and constricting, as the light changes. It’s a kind of through-the-looking-glass guide to life after such a life-altering loss, a dotted line tracing the journey from the certainties of the beforelife to an acceptance of paradox, which is—Chen…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carla Panciera Remember when you discovered that Disney hadn’t gotten it right with their version of fairy tales? How they’d left out the rape of Sleeping Beauty, for example, or the fact that it was Snow White’s mother who sent her seven year old (!) off to be butchered by the huntsman? Well, Mary Lou Buschi’s second collection of poetry, Paddock, is a contemporary reminder: women face many dangers, whether they are the mythical protagonists who journey throughout the pages of this collection, or the very real women who will recognize their own stories of loss and trauma…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Terra Incognita follows Sara Henning’s much-lauded View from True North, co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. In her second collection, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Henning offers the transformational knowledge of how grief drops into our bodies, reframes our memories, and binds us to our lost beloveds. And she does so with exquisite wordcraft that harnesses our emotions. I highly recommend this book for a range of readers: those who already love poetry, and those who would benefit from this gorgeous…
Review by Lynn McGee A design motif on Pools of June by Mary Meriam is the image of bubbles. They appear on the cover, fill an illustrated figure diving into water on the frontispiece, tumble skyward on the title page and encircle page numbers in the table of contents. Every scuba diver knows that bubbles travel up, toward air. Disoriented underwater, it’s wise to follow their trail. Likewise, each poem in Pools of June is a body of water navigated by a speaker who moves in directions the reader might not expect, but which always break the surface into…
Review by Jennifer Saunders Revisiting Medusa in the Age of #MeToo: A Review of Head of a Gorgon by Raegen M. Pietrucha Harm abounds in Raegen M. Pietrucha’s debut full-length poetry collection Head of a Gorgon, but so does healing. Pietrucha, whose chapbook An Animal I Can’t Name won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition, counterpoints the myth of Medusa, raped by Poseidon and punished by Athena, with a present-day story of sexual abuse to trace a long cultural history of misogyny and victim-blaming. Yet even as these poems trace harm, they offer a path towards re/dis-covery.…
Megan Merchant Working the Night Shift String a white sheet from the body of trees in the wild, set a lantern behind its screen and wait for the flush of mottled wings to lisp and net the light, note how some are frayed as edges of a rug beaten against wind, how the brightest markings allow the most brazen behavior, a wingspan—that if crumpled inside a mouth— will tart a tongue. Wait as they collect like silk eyes twitching, paper darts that shred rain, and can trace the scent of a wounded leaf to know where to slip their young…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In A River Within Spills Light, Jane Attanucci’s debut full-length poetry collection, she melds being a mother, a grandmother, and a daughter whose mother died prematurely in both form and free verse. Attanucci is open with her experiences throughout. Her language is friendly and familiar, inviting her audience in as confidants. This a debut from a writer over fifty who is liberal with wisdom and grace. The book begins with the poem “Perhaps I Should Tell You,” which serves as a convocation. Here, she establishes the conversational style that sets the timbre of the…
Review by Lara Lillibridge I personally love story collections in the summer—the small bits fit nicely into a busy schedule and the time away from the book allows the words to linger, as I roll them over in my mind. I had heard about Riham Adly’s flash fiction collection, Love is Make-Believe, and jumped at the chance to review it. An award-winning writer from Giza, Egypt, her website states, For starters I’m rebel at heart who believes in doing what she loves for a living after ditching dentistry for a career in writing and teaching and moderating…
Review by Lynn McGee “The End of Horses” is a book title that puts the concept of finality squarely in the reader’s view. It challenges the cognitive dissonance that enables us to go about our lives unhampered by the despair of living in the earth’s sixth mass extinction — and the first mass extinction caused by our own species. Some of the poems in this collection are sure to become iconic and widely anthologized in collections responding to environmental degeneration and the crises it causes for wildlife and domestic animals across the globe. Margo Taft Stever’s signature gift as a…
Mother Kingdom by Andrea Deeken, Cover and drawings by Hyde Meissner Review by Lynn McGee With Pride Month just having ended and given the Supreme Court’s latest ruling, an epigraph as ordinary as “For my wife and daughter”—found in Mother Kingdom, the 2022 Slapering Hol Press chapbook winner by Andrea Deeken—feels wildly affirming to me, a lesbian who has watched the concepts of family and women’s autonomy evolve over decades. The collection presents fourteen narrative poems that rise with matriarchal revelation and pride. The opening poem, “Lineage,” has a title that reflects a concept running throughout the collection: the inheritance…