Joani Reese FEVER DREAM In the dark, the collector, cape and hood painted black, knocks three times at my sick mother’s door. He salutes the vast heavens, leans his scythe towards the wall, then saunters to her bedside to finesse her withdrawal from the world. His skeletal hands stroke her whisper-fine hair; he waits for the nurse to be busy elsewhere, then he shuffles her memories and settles himself down to read her as though she’s a book to be shelved. He stares from her eyes that have grayed from the green, takes her life for a test drive, wants to see what she’s seen. She dozes,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Nancy Ring HOW BRIGHTLY Hot pink feather, glued by a child. It’s a bird I think, and that feather looks warm. Would that I could pluck it and wear it like a moustache, but it won’t salve these icy arms. Dragging my mother with me, my mother who is always, always cold. We pull our sweater sleeves down over our veined hands, our jackets pulled tight around us, she slow bending over her walker, one small step at a time. But today there is urgency. I magically make her race in hot pursuit. We pass more pink, the hot…
Nida Sophasarun SIRENS We sailed past a tanker to the mouth of the river where the monk chanted and flung holy water over shards of bone laid out in front of her picture. I had prayed days before over her face and body and asked if she could please not haunt me, knowing the spirit usually decides in the days right after. I dropped the clay urn onto the rough and muddy Chao Praya. The cap dislodged, and our boat moved on. I stayed a few days more and ate the papaya, noodles and curries over which, even as…
Jacqueline West WITH THE FIVE-YEAR-OLD AT THE BELL MUSEUM We bring you here to see dead things— green moth wings pinned beneath glass bells, bones ranged in drawers like silver spoons, rows of limp pelts slit from their flesh. Your fingers slip through silver fur. Around the corner, whooping cranes pose on impossible legs, forever dancing, forever still. No dust collects on their outspread wings. Grandest of all, the mastodon, long gone, still standing on its plaster stones, great tusks framing your small self. Your smile. The boxes of minor specimens: extinct pigeons, endangered wolves, owls with their gold…
Sati Mookherjee MY DAUGHTER THE TREE My daughter was born the year she turned fourteen, the year I was born, her spine rose curving into the tissue of sky, she spurned true for lordotic, posture for pose. I told myself: What doesn’t bend, breaks. She lived right by the gaping well. Was born the year of the tree – I used to rake the fat fallen leaves, praying. I’ve shorn shoots, pulled off wire-sharp vines, scratched its bark as tenderly as if she were mine. Because she was mine, I mean. Combed the thatch of her hair, washed…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Skip It, Spice Girls, vanilla body spray, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and frosted eyeshadow. “We’ve grown up when being captured on-screen is still a novelty.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery captures all of the desperation, longing, and joy of a 1990’s girlhood in this slim but powerful chapbook, where girls “…learn hesitation more than certainty.” A time when sexism and sexual assault were routine, Montgomery grows up on the page, graduating from high school teachers who sleep with students to college professors who do the same, learning and rebelling against a culture that tells girls how to…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason Jamie Wendt is an award-winning poet, a prolific book reviewer, and a middle school teacher based in Chicago. Her latest collection of poetry, Laughing in Yiddish, was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and a semifinalist for the 2023 Word Works Washington Prize, the 2022 Longleaf Press Book Contest, and the 2022 Brick Road Poetry Press Book Contest. Several themes run through Wendt’s new book. Immigration is a big one and it’s chilling to think that Wendt wrote these poems several years before the latest immigration and refugee crises, not just…
Review by Kate Lewis With Body, Nina B. Lichtenstein Explores the Physical Contours of Self Navigating through explorations of a body allow author Nina B. Lichtenstein’s memoir, Body: My Life In Parts, to bring together the entirety of her life as she lived it: viscerally, with teeth, and belly, and breasts, and back – as well as how the breakdown of those parts can often bring us to our literal knees. The book traces her life and uncovers the deeper meaning that some of these parts of her brought to the whole. An incident with a bit of…
An Interview with Jocelyn Jane Cox, Author of Motion Dazzle, a Memoir of Motherhood, Loss and Skating on Thin Ice. Interview by Sara Weiss In her debut memoir Motion Dazzle, former competitive figure skater and coach Jocelyn Jane Cox reflects on the deep bond between herself and her mother. She explores a childhood defined by the rigorous demands of training on the ice along with years of sporadic pain and injury, and the sacrifices her mother made to support this pursuit. The book also speaks to “the sandwich generation,” as she recounts the paradox of becoming a new mother…
MER Bookshelf – August 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Suzanne Kamata, River of Dolls and Other Stories, Penguin Random House SEA, January 2025, literary fiction (short stories) These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales and lore, explore the lives of individuals caught between desire and duty, as well as the conflicting expectations of different cultures. For example, in “Day Pass,” a college student in South Carolina befriends a female prisoner on a work release program, thinking that she will be a good influence, but then realizes that she has gotten in over her head.…