Review by Yvonne Higgins Leach Katy Ellis’ book-length prose poem Home Water, Home Land has all the ingredients that make for an engaging read: inspiring settings, unexpected turns, and character growth. I read the book in one sitting, turning each page to keep learning more about the narrator’s journey of breaking away, of experiencing new borders of land and water, new relationships, and questioning what she truly desires. I read each page relishing the beautiful language, the poetry of life. The book is written as an entire prose poem. At first that can seem overwhelming, but Ellis organized it…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Olivia Kate Cerrone In the title poem that opens Julia Lisella’s latest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, the lived life that was once familiar is “now broken into village plots that others love to visit.” Reshaped by grief, memories take on new associations, evoking startling possibilities and insights in a narrative terrain where “almost anything can grow here—even last year’s annuals come shunting through with a tiny roar.” Lisella’s elegant and vividly rendered poems are wise, compassionate, and far-reaching in their scope, interweaving haunting themes on what is endured and sustained through seasons of motherhood and marriage, beloved…
Reborn of Secrets and Teeth: A Review of Kimberly Ann Priest’s Slaughter the One Bird by Jessica L. Walsh There will be diseased houses, God tells Moses and Aaron in Leviticus, before recounting to them the complex steps needed to purify a dwelling. When a priest finally deems the house clean, he will sanctify it through the ritual of two birds: slaughter the first bird over a vessel, dip the living bird in its blood, and cast the blood through the house seven times. Thus, in the story of the two birds, one does indeed survive—but does so awash in…
Shared Breath: Motherhood in the Time of Climate Crisis Megan Jacobs Shared Breath: Motherhood in the Time of Climate Crisis, explores environmental grief through a twin-lens investigation: the interconnection of motherhood and climate crisis. Our collective loss in thinking of the Earth as a “mother”—who both provides for humans and should be cared for—has had devastating effects on the planet. My family and I live in New Mexico and these changes have become personal and visceral as we breathe in smoke from the largest wildfire in NM history. We must learn to acknowledge a “shared breath” with our environment. My…
Tamara L. Panici Mama’s Lessons on Sarmale Uită-te, to make sarmale, you must understand the difference between wanted and unwanted. The key being a perception, a human invention. Do not forget. You are both wanted and unwanted. Seen one way and the exact opposite. Do not let this confuse your stride, my scooped out soul, my little bruised one. To make sarmale, take the unwanted heads, the browning leaves chewed on the edges. Work through your hands. Fill each layer of cabbage with the flesh of forgotten beasts. Season with sweet spices and dessicated herbs. The grubby little…
Review by Emily Webber We all feel fear, and many of us are plagued by irrational fears that live in the deepest parts of us, the ones we never talk about with other people. If I let myself, I can spend hours thinking about how our bodies break down—cancer, accidents, violence, and natural disasters—and fall deeper and deeper into a black hole of fear. I run through all the ways my life could be cut short, so I’m not around for my five-year-old son and all reasons he may not outlive me. I don’t share these fears with others, but…
Review by Laura Dennis One does not soon forget a book that alliteratively offers a “huge, homosexual umbrella,” not just once, but three times, each framed a little differently, in a single poem. Indeed, the title of said poem, “Flamboyant,” could easily describe not only the umbrella, but also Melissa Studdard’s new poetry collection as a whole The reading experience begins with the front cover, which features a smokestack, fanned-out dollar bills, and a typewriter labeled “Poems,” bordered by fuchsia blossoms and overlaid with the cutout of a woman in an extravagant orange gown. The title, Dear Selection Committee,…