Congratulations and good luck to our Pushcart Prize nominees: POETRY Doralee Brooks, “Hips” Carolina Hotchandani, “Chiaroscuro” Hilary King, “Investigations” Natalie Solmer, “I Am a Great Lake” FICTION Cheryl J. Fish, “A Seven-Year-Old Left Alone Shivering” NONFICTION Cheliss Thayer, “Co-Sleeper”
Author: Mom Egg Review
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Books on our radar this month, new and coming soon! Jennifer Gravley, The Story I Told My Mother: Poems and an Essay, Twelve Winters Press, September 2023, poetry. The first book from short story writer, poet, and essayist Jennifer Gravley, The Story I Told My Mother questions what it means to be the adult daughter of a mother—and eventually, a daughter without a mother. The opening poems, anchored in this inevitably fraught relationship, recount a desire for connection that is ultimately unachievable with the death of Gravley’s mother. The concluding hermit crab essay…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, art critic and curator Hettie Judah takes the reader on a wide-ranging and engaging “imaginary museum” tour that examines the many permutations of art lived in and through motherhood. It’s an eye-opening tour de force that challenges readers to consider what hangs in museums and what vanishes in the act of being born. Early on, Judah sets up themes that she will return to: mothers divine, artist as mother, mother as creator, caregiver, consoler, feminist. With a keen curatorial eye, she has assembled an eclectic and…
Review by Katie Kalisz Ellen Kombiyil’s second full-length collection, Love as Invasive Species, is dedicated at the beginning of Side A “for daughters” – as though daughters have it hardest, growing up through the inherited invasive love, deciding what to shed, what to keep, how to remember. The collection is a double book, with poems that “mirror and respond to each other.” There are two ways to read this book. When I first sat down with it, I read it “straight” through, beginning with Side A, getting to the end of that, which is the mid-point of the book,…
A Literary Reflection by Rosemary Starace As an adopted person myself, hopeful and concerned about how adoption is viewed by society, I was eager to delve into Marianne Novy’s new book—a careful, caring survey of 47 first-person stories from birth mothers, same-race and different-race adoptees, and adoptive parents. She finds “moving portrayals of grief, anger, courage, persistence, joy, learning, and forgiveness” and presents them in the hope that these real stories help readers understand “the complexity of emotions… [and] the complexity of social justice issues adoption can pose” (both 15). Novy, also an adoptee, is Professor Emerita of English…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Waking to Brevity is a testament to love, life, and how the poet and her husband came to terms with the encroachment of his Parkinson’s Disease. Sarah W. Bartlett has created a touching, brave, and ultimately inspiring collection of public and private moments, chronicling a relationship through early romance, building a family, and growing older and dependent. Her poems become a collective meditation on time and the precious aspects of the ephemeral. It is a most poignant journey, filled with gratitude even as grief settles in, for a shared life of devotion and memories. The…
Review by Lara Lillibridge The Presence of Absence: Kitchen table talks about parenting, leaving fundamentalism, and the very messy business of living with loss by Desiree Richter Desiree Richter is a musician, research instructor and dissertation consultant who believes that writing about loss honestly can help us heal. Her love for her children shines in The Presence of Absence, and her frankness about the eternal nature of loss is as refreshing as it is devastating. In the introduction, entitled, “Welcome to this Book!” Richter explains how this book came into existence. These kitchen table conversations began as a…
Review by Judy Kaber A scholar and a prolific writer, Claire Millikin’s ninth book of poetry, Magicicada (Unicorn Press, 2024), reflects her continuing feminist stance. In it she examines the fate of girls and young women who grow up voiceless and abused in a patriarchal society. Having been raised in the deep south, the song of periodical cicadas wove itself into Millikin’s consciousness and in this book of poems she uses the life cycle and the song of those cicadas as a vehicle to express the brutality of a young teen placed in isolation and her ultimate release. The…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Joan Kwon Glass’s first full-length collection of poems, Night Swim, was steeped in the grief of having lost to suicide first her young nephew, then her sister. This second collection, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, explores loss in broader terms—placing it in the context of geographical dislocation, political violence, and America’s own strange cruelties and dangers. With their (mainly) long lines and unadorned diction, these poems are accessible and compelling. Many start in familiar settings—Pizza Hut, the Barbie movie, the mall, a Big Boy restaurant—then zoom out into deeper considerations before returning us to an…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett In her debut chapbook, Nina Prater shares a series of simple pleasures, moments, and their simple lessons. Again and again and again. Often, when asked to assemble a collection of poems, I seek the story arc, progression or circle. This collection, by contrast, offers delicious sinking-in, encouraging and supporting in-the-moment lingering. An arc of sheer experience, as if walking alongside the poet through her day. And really, how could one miss this intent, with the wonderful book-end poems of “The Drive to Work” and “Acceptance”? In the former, right out of the gate, we…