Karolina Zapal My Future Daughter During Adolescence My mother is crazy She passes out copies of her favorite poetry to us every morning with toast. She says I am just like her We both stick our noses in our books, hoping no one important catches us like we were colds I cannot count how many times I have opened a book and not finished it I want to be held firmly by words like an eyelash on my finger in the shower I can’t blow off to make a wish but I feel like a coward cozy, caught on…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Mindy Kronenberg To Set Right is a collection of poems that hovers in time and place, summoning an almost mystical journey of resilience of the self, ancestry, history, and the fragility of the physical realm. Shapiro also connects her Jewish identity to the many revelatory rites of passage in her life, and the events of each of these eighteen poems float and shimmer on the page with the dream-like quality of the airborne subjects of a Chagall painting. The contents and titles of each work run sideways on the page, also presenting a “tilt” in the reader’s…
Review by Jennifer Martelli In the acrostic poem that introduces Michelle Reale’s latest collection, Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily, Professor Alex Otieno writes, “Liminal experiences of: working, loving, hoping, regaling, dancing and singing, summoning.” These poems, written in the voices of refuges from Africa, as well as the voice of the witness, occupy this “liminal space,” a space of confini: borders. Reale unflinchingly examines the borderlands of language, of confinement of the body, and finally, the poetry that witnesses the refugee who flees war, poverty, and environmental disasters that cause “any one of us to leave our home…
Review by Celia Jeffries Today we have a growing genre known as fractured fairy tales and now, in The Daddy Chronicles, we may be experiencing yet another new genre: the fractured children’s story. Not that this memoir is a tale for children, but that it reads like a children’s book. Do not be deceived by the lovely cadence of these short vignettes. Make no mistake: this is not a children’s book, but a book for adults, specifically female adults, specifically female adults who have grown up with absent fathers. The Daddy Chronicles opens with “Ode to the Lone Sperm”:…
Review by Abby Orenstein Ash I once nannied for a wise and sarcastic professor who told me, “This era is absurd. Women are expected to take care of everything in the household, work, and now, they have to get down on the rug and play with their kids.” Having no children at the time, I did not viscerally understand her point, but I was already well aware of the prevailing societal expectation that women, and particularly mothers, are required to wrangle with even more today than in the past. Modern family life is defined by an abundance of cultural…
MER Online Quarterly March 15, 2022 New Poetry Folio – Release Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featured Poets: Marie-Célie Agnant (translated by Danielle Legros Georges) Sheila Clark-Jones Jessica Cuello N.F. Kimball Chrissy Martin Chloe Martinez Tzynya Pinchback Heidi Seaborn Art by Amy Dignan MER News: AWP 2022 Meet-Up/ Book Table/Editors’ Activities
Welcome to the March 2022 MER Online Folio: Release In her poem, “Summer Arthritis Lessons,” Chrissy Martin writes, “We speak in this language of trinkets and remedies / that say I know what causes you pain.” The poems in the MER Online March folio explore these “trinkets and remedies” for release, relief, and agency. The poets examine everyday objects and infuse them with poetry, magic, and perhaps something sacred, worshipful. Tzynya Pinchback creates a holy space when she writes, “Before the knowledge of pain, man heard the call of sugar. / Skin of innocence shed, Eve built an altar to…
Marie-Célie Agnant from Balafres translated from the French by Danielle Legros Georges EUMÉNIDES My body holds the habits of delirious torrents of rumblings of earth in rebellious jolts Revolt in the body fastened since the first dawn humanity’s tongues hold no words for my whirlwinds My body holds wild words surging sulfur ashes lava and time since the Érinyes in my body is no more thirst mountains stones heated white shards MOTHER’S DAY To imagine you gone this Sunday gone from your life the music scent of chicken bean sauce the cadence of forks the familiar voices You…
Jessica Cuello These epistolary poems are written in the voice of Mary Shelley as she addresses her dead mother, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft died 10 days after giving birth. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, raised Mary with unusual strictness and little affection. P. refers to Percy Bysshe Shelley who first visited the Godwin household as an admirer of Godwin’s radical ideas. Godwin did not approve of a relationship between Mary and Percy; Percy was already married and his wife was pregnant with their second child. Percy and Mary met secretly by Wollstonecraft’s grave. When she had her first child, Mary was unmarried…
N.F. Kimball “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” THE BURIAL I had a dream once, of my life standing still. I saw behind closed eyes the Earth forgiving me, the parts of my being I must bury; the nautilus of sound. In this dream I had no body. I had no neck, I had no voice. Wool cloaked the part of my country where I sat, my placenta & my flower. I became blurry, my errors were sisters with the open field. And then – how I existed did not matter. I salvage the…