Kyle Potvin The Clock Turns Back 1965 Birth mother, my first mother. Small, startled breaths. How did you learn you were pregnant? * In the cruel November air, did you pray, hand on womb, dread pounding your unmarried body? * I imagine delighted rebellion had risen inside you, far from home, in the hours, days, months before. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Ticked a clock. Until it stopped. * Did you hear that year the death list of Washington women included1: Mother of three who died during an abortion attempted by a 45-year-old practical nurse, police said. 26-year old who…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Flame Nebula, Bright Nova by Sherre Vernon Author’s Note I did not know that Flame Nebula would shine so brightly until it was nearly finished. I could only tell you that I had lived much of my life under a metaphor of flame. As a child I was caught in a conflagration of emotions and tensions that ultimately separated me from any hope of intimacy with my mother. Though this estrangement hurt me, I mostly put it out of mind until I found myself on the verge of motherhood. For my mother, who is often associated with smoke in…
Review by Carla Panciera In her debut collection, Pelted by Flowers, Kali Lightfoot writes, “It took years to learn the language of myself.” She takes her readers along on her journey of discovery. Lightfoot is a master of juxtaposition. Even the book’s sections are studies in contrasts: The early years of her life growing up in Michigan as a child surrounded by peers at summer camp and in her high school band, with her time spent alone in the wilderness as a ranger. A traveler whose poems transport us to Kyoto and Lesvos and the Outer Cape, and a resident…
Review by Sherre Vernon The ‘80s were shoulder pads and pearls. The ‘80s were for Jennifers and sex and space—and The Queen of Queens gives us all of this and more. Martelli’s speaker has “orbited over three decades” and shows us “[e]verything then / is happening again” (18), particularly for women. This speaker, the gray pearl of the first poem, shouts through “five types of hunger…The hunger for love. The hunger for freedom from bondage of self. The hunger for cock. The hunger for full moons. The hunger to know” (33). This is a collection that eats what the…
Review by Christine Salvatore What washed over me as I read Marina Carreira’s new book of poetry, Tanto Tanto, can only be described as raw emotion. The title means “so much, so much” in Portuguese, and it is a fitting name for the poems that follow. In every poem, a love song is sung, not a sentimental song, but a song of grit, rejection, joy, confusion, and passion. The book is broken up into six sections and each section begins with a poem entitled “Tanto Tanto.” Dedicated in part to “all the queer daughters of immigrants,” the book opens…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva From the very title of her latest full-length poetry collection, Sweetbitter (Sundress 2021), we understand that Stacey Balkun will purposefully use the power of syntax to open up stories. Her subject matter is, in part, the lives of 90s adolescent girls in Possumtown, NJ; the effects of a chemical plant and atomic testing on a community; the way stories have power over us and, ultimately, how we also have power over our stories. Balkun skillfully uses the contrapuntal form, the technique of erasure (of 90s rock lyrics, of engineering documents, newspaper articles), and many other…
Review by Janet McCann Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For is a luminous book that combines Marjorie Maddox’s poems with Karen Elias’s photography to create a reflective, silvery, sad and yet hopeful artistic experience. Since the photos and poems are symbiotic, quotation does not do the work justice. there is such a significant interplay between poems and photos. Elias’s photos are of a cracked stone heart in various natural and artistic settings. The heart is certainly not the cold stone heart of country music. Rather, the central symbol takes over the work in image and word, suggesting all kinds of…
Review by Michelle Panik In a world like ours—unstable, inconsistent, and rife with turmoil—And If the Woods Carry You examines what it means to both be a child in and bring children into such an explosive climate. Erin Rodoni’s collection of highly visual poems is firmly rooted in the outdoors; the book is brimming with references to forests and summer fields, to hunting and pond swimming, to insects and weather, and is replete with enough fruits and vegetables ripening on their vines to feed an audience at a Politics and Prose reading. And yet, these poems aren’t paeans to…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger With whimsy, wit, and often uncomfortable situations, Jennifer Fliss shares an engrossing collection of domestic flash stories in The Predatory Animal Ball. With forty stories in only 176 pages, you’d assume you’ll get overwhelmed with so many changes, but Fliss keeps a throughline with subject matter and situations. Simultaneously, each story is unique enough to keep anyone’s interests piqued. The Predatory Animal Ball is Fliss’ first book, but is not her first publication. She has a number of short stories and essays published both online and in print. Her work has appeared in the…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press) and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading,…