Review by Laura Dennis We usually hear “Hallelujah” as a joyful chorus, a sort of incantation expressing gratitude to the divine. In Hallelujah Science, however, poet, performer, and Cave Canem fellow Kelli Stevens Kane incorporates it into a new song that weaves myriad other spells. That is not to say spirituality is absent from Kane’s debut poetry collection, a work 10 years in the making. The poem “(59),” for example, opens with the proclamation “She is risen,” which both echoes Christian scripture and demonstrates the embodiment with which these poems are infused. “(59)” takes us from resurrection to angels,…
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Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez I tumbled through Meghan Sterling’s debut full-length poetry collection, These Few Seeds, the poems loose gems in my hands. The facets of each are similar—domestic inspiration and intimate meditation made transcendent across branching sentences—and yet each left its singular impression. If you open to any poem at random—“Still Life with Snow,” “Monsters in the Water,” “Her Body Bends like a Tent on Fire”—you’ll want to dig in and experience them all. Whether romantic and familial, love is this book’s gravitational pull. “Memory is a Greek Island” delineates love’s boundlessness: “I decided here to love all…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger The Hive puts a finger on what American media has been chasing since the Tea Party formed and through Donald Trump’s term as president: small-town Midwest Americans’ motivations. In her second novel, Melissa Scholes Young gives us the Fehlers, a working-class family holding on to a struggling small business during the height of the Great Recession. Through self-discovery and economic necessity, the Fehler Sisters move the family into the twenty-first century, but not without pain and suffering. The book begins with the Fehler Sisters at their fishing camp on the Mississippi, thinking about what…
Review by Sherre Vernon Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, California and is the poetry director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies, Gold Passage, There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air and West : Fire : Archive. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University, and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. West : Fire : Archive is a carefully organized lyric history. As hinted at in the structure of the title, the book is split into three sections, archival boxes…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In her haunting book, Lock Her Up, Tina Parker switches effortlessly between writing persona poems, concrete poems, and epistolary verses, as well as transforming medical forms based on real-life response into poetic renderings. My only criticism is that at the end of the book I was left bereft because there was not more to read. I wanted longer poems, as well as many more. Then, I began to see the sheer impossibility of demanding more from these voices inhabiting the author’s being. These desperate voices must have been terrifying to discern. Crafted from documents…
Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 47th 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 Art: Henny Burnett Poem: Sarah Freligh Henny Burnett 365 Days of Plastic (2020-2021) 365 Days of Plastic is an installation and sculpture that is cast in pink dental plaster. It demonstrates…
Review by Carla Panciera I’ve never been to New Mexico, but after reading Bosque, a collection of poetry from Albuquerque’s poet laureate, Michelle Otero, the landscape rises before me: coyote fences, January yucca fronds, lanceleaf sage, salt cedar, mesquite pods. The poems assembled here read like a catalog not only of place, but of family, of a history that is personal, cultural, and geographical. In fact, the book’s title derives from the cottonwood forest that borders the Rio Grande and runs through New Mexico. Part wetlands, part farmland, part riparian forest, it is as unique as it is endangered, despite…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Rarely does a book come along that combines historical, literary, and artistic icons with the ordeals of intimate relationships. Woman Drinking Absinthe deftly chronicles the age-old saga of desire and deceit with unexpected detours. The book is divided into five sections, all rich in image and detail. In the second poem, The Bear, a sleeping world is separated only by a windowpane through which a bear entreats the woman. “I’m not dangerous.” (p. 5). This sets up the idea that an obvious peril can engage the speaker with disingenuous words and sensual gestures. The collection…
The Write, Publish, and Shine podcast will help you go from emerging writer to luminary author. Hosted by author and editor Rachel Thompson, the podcast features interviews with a diverse range of lit mag editors, including Mom Egg Review’s Marjorie Tesser. Listen to Write, Publish, and Shine for a deep-dive into what editors want in submissions plus conversations on writing craft and representation. Search your podcast app for Write, Publish, and Shine or go to rachelthompson.co/podcast.
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Occasionally a poetry collection comes along to remind us of the fragility of life and the volatility of relationships. Gloria Mindock’s new book, Ash does just this. With spare language and stark details, the debris left behind by fire becomes a symbol of the ways humans fail each other. The human heart, erratic and misshapen beats the rhythm of these shortcomings in poem after poem. Ash, ponders what remains after relationships smolder and fizzle out, and the range of destruction that can be wrought becomes a dominant narrative throughout the collection. The book is divided…