Chrissy Martin SUMMER ARTHRITIS LESSONS My mother slips a careful sock onto my feet, and even though I am 27 and perfectly capable of dressing myself, I let her. They are excessively thick and knit for July heat, but this is one lesson she passes down. No matter your sweat, keep your feet covered. When I visit her, she lays out a extra fuzzy blanket and when she visits me, a heating pad waits expectantly on her bed like boutique hotel towel origami. We speak in this language of trinkets and remedies that say I know what causes…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Chloe Martinez SEASCAPE “Juego de manos (Hand Play), Juchitán, Oaxaca” [Graciela Iturbide, photograph, 1988; Philadelphia Museum of Art] Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. www.chloeAVmartinez.com
Tzynya Pinchback A SONG FOR DESIRE Before the knowledge of pain, man heard the call of sugar. Skin of innocence shed, Eve built an altar to sugar. I plant one thing of beauty in my garden, no nightshades, a stone path to a tree that explodes, in spring, with sugar. Johnny Appleseed was a capitalist, not a saint. His ministry modest: quick cheap high, land, and sugar. The rich cousins out East had lakeside homes and horses. Us? Endless summer and a tide-chasing mutt named Sugar. Shacked up two weeks, the Northridge quake jolted us from bed. We hid…
Heidi Seaborn SEARCHING FOR SIGNS OF LIFE, A ZUIHITSU ~for Audrey Rían Even in the sluggish hours, I listen for signs of life. And when the moon clicks into the night sky, I hear it calling. According to NASA, we are returning to the moon. We’ve missed her or maybe she’s missed us. I text my friend Lynda. We’ve lost touch. I am worried. Dark side of the moon kind of worried. She texts back. We make space on our calendars. I star the time. When I balance on the white picket fence my love built, I wonder if…
Here’s where we’ll be at #AWP22: We’ll see you at the BOOK Table – T 562! Special AWP prices! Free writing prompts! MER submissions and join our staff info! MER Meet-up At the Book Table Fri. March 25th 11-12 P.M. Meet the Editors! With Jenn Martelli, Cindy Veach, J.P. Howard, and Marjorie Tesser Drawing for subscriptions, issues, and more!
Review by Michelle Panik Barbara Henning’s biography of her mother, Ferne: A Detroit Story, arrived in my mailbox at the same time that I’d been listening to Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore album in earnest. One of my favorite tracks on the album is “For Martha,” which concerns the death of Billie Corgan’s mother. And while the relationships these two writers had with their mothers were drastically different, Corgan’s words nevertheless compelled me to consider the end of Ferne Hostetter’s life while still reading about her youth. And my impulse wasn’t off-base because, from the beginning, readers know that Ferne’s life…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Reading Jenny Qi’s Focal Point, I thought of Orpheus, whose songs so charmed the god of the Underworld, he was permitted to lead his dead wife back to life. True, Orpheus looked back when he shouldn’t have and lost her again. But on a less literal level, Jenny Qi’s poems manage a similar magic, bringing her mother before us, rescuing her from oblivion. We are each, Qi writes in her poem “Magnificent Things,” a “ghost in the making”; but these incisive, moving poems insist on poetry’s power to make us something else besides. Qi was…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger Hysterical Water is beautifully dense. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh’s writing, whether wholly her own words or found texts, demands her readers to slow down and devote time to these poems. Both intimate and expansive, these sometimes uncomfortable poems comfortably situate themselves in the ongoing conversations of feminism, motherhood, depression, and self-harm. Divided into five sections, Hysterical Water parses the connotations of the word hysterical, digging at its Greek roots and engages with the application of hysteria and all that it implies. The opening poem in the first section, “A Lady Author’s Defense of the Female…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Aileen Weintraub is a writer, journalist, and editor based in New York. She is the author of three middle-grade books: WE GOT GAME! 35 Female Athletes Who Changed the World, which was A Mighty Girl’s Best Book of the Year; Never Too Young: 50 Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference, winner of a Parents’ Choice Award; and Secrets of the American Museum of Natural History, a collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History. Weintraub has also had articles and essays published in The Washington Post, HuffPost, NBC, AARP, Glamour, and other publications. Knocked Down…
Review by Sunni Brown Wilkinson If one virtue of poetry is to give voice to the too-often voiceless, then Jessica Cuello’s collection Liar sings: for the forgotten child, hungry child at the back of the classroom, girl in a world without touch, girl who’s called a “whore,” girl tripping behind her mother at the laundromat, child in the hospital bed, the silent, the illiterate, the fatherless, the motherless. Liar sings the blues of the ignored, the unwanted, the untouched. And like song, the constraint of the voice, the pitch of individual witness, the tenderness for the world in spite…