Jodi Boulton The Badlands They say they’re the result of two geological processes, deposition and erosion. What I know is this: The earth there rubs like dry, gritty clay and is the color of putty against my palms. Alligator fossils, Amethyst haze sunsets, and my childrens’ silhouettes against the striations and water marks – the architecture of ancient epochs. And now we stand in the kitchen our six hands molding the flour adding the water, salt, and egg, creating rugged peaks, our Brule and Sharps, on the cool black granite. Chemistry of rain, sand and wind, of water, salt,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Michelle Panik The book jacket for Dallas Woodburn’s collection of short stories, How to Make Paper When the World is Ending, describes itself as “the ghosts of what might yet be and the ghosts of what might have been,” which was intriguing enough to pique my interest. When the blurb subsequently posed the question, “How is each of us shaped by what haunts us?” I knew I had to read this book. While so many collections are organized around a subject matter, a setting, or a character, it’s rare that one operates within such an elliptical theme…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Elina Eihmane, a Latvian artist, filmmaker, poet, and mother based in Taipei, Taiwan, has published a gorgeous, handmade feast of visual poetry, One Day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum through The Emma Press (March 2021). Inviting to the touch, the book is 36 stapled risograph pages. The back of the book frames this chapbook-length work as a love letter from a mother to a son, but, importantly, the book also surrounds the mother writer with a healing compassion that reaches out to other mothers who have suffered difficult births and challenging postpartum…
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi For My Daughter Not with the milk coursing through my breast but with the sap singing in my unwritten poems did I feed you. Long nights, until the glowing of dew on every lonely leaf; I was from head to toe a pair of open eyes, to cool your fever simmering the sea of my words . Long days, closing the white notebook of my desirous moments, I followed your tottering steps in the parks and playgrounds to reach the unreachable dandelions. Every morning breaking the pure silence of sunrise, with the noise of the juicer I…
Review by Anna Laura Reeve Kirsten Shu-ying Chen’s impressive debut centers her experience caring for her dying mother, and the established structures and systems that erode under the influence of that grief. These poems exist in a liminal space, functioning both as the small light of human perception glowing in a universe of dark matter and as an eye, pupil dilating and constricting, as the light changes. It’s a kind of through-the-looking-glass guide to life after such a life-altering loss, a dotted line tracing the journey from the certainties of the beforelife to an acceptance of paradox, which is—Chen…
Review by Carla Panciera Remember when you discovered that Disney hadn’t gotten it right with their version of fairy tales? How they’d left out the rape of Sleeping Beauty, for example, or the fact that it was Snow White’s mother who sent her seven year old (!) off to be butchered by the huntsman? Well, Mary Lou Buschi’s second collection of poetry, Paddock, is a contemporary reminder: women face many dangers, whether they are the mythical protagonists who journey throughout the pages of this collection, or the very real women who will recognize their own stories of loss and trauma…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Terra Incognita follows Sara Henning’s much-lauded View from True North, co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. In her second collection, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Henning offers the transformational knowledge of how grief drops into our bodies, reframes our memories, and binds us to our lost beloveds. And she does so with exquisite wordcraft that harnesses our emotions. I highly recommend this book for a range of readers: those who already love poetry, and those who would benefit from this gorgeous…
Review by Lynn McGee A design motif on Pools of June by Mary Meriam is the image of bubbles. They appear on the cover, fill an illustrated figure diving into water on the frontispiece, tumble skyward on the title page and encircle page numbers in the table of contents. Every scuba diver knows that bubbles travel up, toward air. Disoriented underwater, it’s wise to follow their trail. Likewise, each poem in Pools of June is a body of water navigated by a speaker who moves in directions the reader might not expect, but which always break the surface into…
Review by Jennifer Saunders Revisiting Medusa in the Age of #MeToo: A Review of Head of a Gorgon by Raegen M. Pietrucha Harm abounds in Raegen M. Pietrucha’s debut full-length poetry collection Head of a Gorgon, but so does healing. Pietrucha, whose chapbook An Animal I Can’t Name won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition, counterpoints the myth of Medusa, raped by Poseidon and punished by Athena, with a present-day story of sexual abuse to trace a long cultural history of misogyny and victim-blaming. Yet even as these poems trace harm, they offer a path towards re/dis-covery.…
Megan Merchant Working the Night Shift String a white sheet from the body of trees in the wild, set a lantern behind its screen and wait for the flush of mottled wings to lisp and net the light, note how some are frayed as edges of a rug beaten against wind, how the brightest markings allow the most brazen behavior, a wingspan—that if crumpled inside a mouth— will tart a tongue. Wait as they collect like silk eyes twitching, paper darts that shred rain, and can trace the scent of a wounded leaf to know where to slip their young…