Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger An ABD (all-but-done with dissertation) doctoral student absent of motivation, an artistic worker trapped in a corporate job and craving motherhood, and a yoga instructor seeking the good in all make up main characters in Off the Yoga Mat, a novel by Cheryl J. Fish. Divided into chapters dominated by one of the three main protagonists of the novel, the book is a modern tale of three people on the cusp of middle age Set in 1999, before cell phones were ubiquitous and when the city was still affectionately gritty, the book begins in…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lara Lillibridge You ask any four-year-old what they want to be when they grow up, and the answers are relatively predictable: doctor, teacher, firefighter, astronaut, veterinarian … […] My honest, doe-eyed reply? I wanted to be a chair. Ryan Rae Harbuck was a sixteen-year-old girl in Colorado who swam on the swim team, went to high school dances, and all the typical things until an accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. This heart-warming and often funny memoir follows her journey through young adulthood and into marriage and toddler-rearing. This is not an illness or disability…
Review by Ruth Hoberman “When I kiss her, I bend lower than I used to.” So thinks an adult daughter as she leaves her mother after a visit. Anyone who has ever had aging parents will recognize that gradual, deepening knowledge of impending loss: “Her hair, cut short,/shows the shape of her skull.” But Jennifer L Freed’s debut collection of poems, When Light Shifts, doesn’t proceed as expected, from aging to death. In lucid, restrained, yet powerful language, Freed tells the story of her mother’s stroke, then partial recovery—a loss complicated by what is not lost, yet can’t be…
Review by Kimberly Lee (M)othering—an anthology of writing and art edited by Annie Sorbie and Heidi Grogan (Inanna 2022) has a saturated indigo cover filled with vibrant shapes and patterns in contrasting colors that delight the eye. As the images indicate, this compilation of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, punctuated by a selection of visual work, shape-shifts among numerous perspectives and incarnations in its thoughtful exploration of motherhood. The second thing one’s eye is drawn to, quite possibly after a double take, is the title. As the parenthetical “M” suggests, this compilation goes beyond any strictly confined notions of…
MER Quarterly September 2022 Literature Eco-Poetry: Nature Through the Lens of Motherhood MER Poetry Folio Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Art M.A.M.A. Issue No. 52 – Performance Manifesto
HBAC PERFORMANCE MANIFESTO SLQS (Sarah Le Quang Sang) Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 52nd edition of this scholarly discourse. Literature intersects with art to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA #artandmotherhood HBAC PERFORMANCE MANIFESTO Sarah Le Quang Sang To the medicalised institutions, their medical staff and the health governmental bodies ARE YOU…
Eco-poetry: Nature Through the Lens of Motherhood We live in fraught ecological times, as unchecked-climate change threatens our planet. And though we—humankind—may be the invasive species, “we are,” as the poet Ashia Ajani writes, “nature, entangled in her movements.” The poems in September’s MER online folio explore this entanglement of natural and emotional landscapes. Written through the lens of motherhood, the poems delve into personal narratives that grow beyond the boundaries of the body, firmly rooting themselves in their ecospheres. These are poems that not only confront the political ramifications of neglecting our world, but poems that weave a…
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Love, Earth Mother Do you know how many times I’ve started over, without you, on my own? Once, in a beetle’s floral gown, I scraped together a semblance of a planet. I breathe so quietly now like when after one of many global extinctions, two-hundred-and-fifty-two million years ago, you’d hear prehistoric, corseted dragonflies make love mid-air, iridescently as orgasms go. Leaf and root came back, feather and bone, they always do. Even if a bulb’s upside down, I shoot up canary yellows, lavender goblets when I want. I go where I want to go. If…
Anna Laura Reeve Exile Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living and gardening near the Tennessee Overhill region, historic land of the Eastern Cherokee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, and others. Her first collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, is coming in 2023 from Belle Point Press.
Catherine Esposito Prescott Black Creek Trail or Annual Bike Ride During the Pandemic When Our Usual Route Is Closed New Year’s Day, 2021 Every vulture in Miami congregates on the outskirts of this landfill, and we ride past their murder without speaking, no, that is of crows, past their wake, a wake of vultures, a wake which seems perfect rather than prophetic—cloaked in full black, full mourning regalia, keeping vigil for this year— or wake as in the thoughts that simmer and spring me into day before first light or wake as in the Old English wacu, the strong…