Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger Jennifer Case’s second essay collection, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), offers a raw and tender look at birth and motherhood in present-day America. Case exposes the continued problematic expectations of women in heterosexual relationships, while acknowledging biology and unfounded—sometimes, seemingly inexplicable—shame. Case is a professor in Arkansas who has an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD from Binghamton. In the prologue, entitled “Message for the Animal Mother,” Case begins with “You are teats-tingling, hairy line from your pubis to your belly button,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jill Koren Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, Allison Blevins’s fifth full-length book, Where Will We Live if The House Burns Down? (Persea Books, 2024) certainly does its work in honoring the “playful love of language” and “fierce conscience” Rudnitsky’s own poems exhibit. Blevins, also the author of five chapbooks, extends her canon of works examining the inexpressible experience of living in a body in pain, a house on fire, among other bodies who burn and circle: “because there are the children. Always the children” (3). While motherhood is certainly a recurring theme in…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen Beyond a simple piece of land separating waters, there is an expanse of field that we all must traverse. This unknown territory encompasses aging and death. Yet we shouldn’t let our demise be at the center of our world. With the strong poetic voice of Carolyn Clark to emulate, we can look upon the time of aging as one of generativity. This watershed time can usher in the quiet space needed to come to terms with our shared humanity. As women, we may no longer be a hands-on mother to human children, but we…
Congratulations and good luck to our Pushcart Prize nominees: POETRY Doralee Brooks, “Hips” Carolina Hotchandani, “Chiaroscuro” Hilary King, “Investigations” Natalie Solmer, “I Am a Great Lake” FICTION Cheryl J. Fish, “A Seven-Year-Old Left Alone Shivering” NONFICTION Cheliss Thayer, “Co-Sleeper”
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Books on our radar this month, new and coming soon! Jennifer Gravley, The Story I Told My Mother: Poems and an Essay, Twelve Winters Press, September 2023, poetry. The first book from short story writer, poet, and essayist Jennifer Gravley, The Story I Told My Mother questions what it means to be the adult daughter of a mother—and eventually, a daughter without a mother. The opening poems, anchored in this inevitably fraught relationship, recount a desire for connection that is ultimately unachievable with the death of Gravley’s mother. The concluding hermit crab essay…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, art critic and curator Hettie Judah takes the reader on a wide-ranging and engaging “imaginary museum” tour that examines the many permutations of art lived in and through motherhood. It’s an eye-opening tour de force that challenges readers to consider what hangs in museums and what vanishes in the act of being born. Early on, Judah sets up themes that she will return to: mothers divine, artist as mother, mother as creator, caregiver, consoler, feminist. With a keen curatorial eye, she has assembled an eclectic and…
Review by Katie Kalisz Ellen Kombiyil’s second full-length collection, Love as Invasive Species, is dedicated at the beginning of Side A “for daughters” – as though daughters have it hardest, growing up through the inherited invasive love, deciding what to shed, what to keep, how to remember. The collection is a double book, with poems that “mirror and respond to each other.” There are two ways to read this book. When I first sat down with it, I read it “straight” through, beginning with Side A, getting to the end of that, which is the mid-point of the book,…
A Literary Reflection by Rosemary Starace As an adopted person myself, hopeful and concerned about how adoption is viewed by society, I was eager to delve into Marianne Novy’s new book—a careful, caring survey of 47 first-person stories from birth mothers, same-race and different-race adoptees, and adoptive parents. She finds “moving portrayals of grief, anger, courage, persistence, joy, learning, and forgiveness” and presents them in the hope that these real stories help readers understand “the complexity of emotions… [and] the complexity of social justice issues adoption can pose” (both 15). Novy, also an adoptee, is Professor Emerita of English…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Waking to Brevity is a testament to love, life, and how the poet and her husband came to terms with the encroachment of his Parkinson’s Disease. Sarah W. Bartlett has created a touching, brave, and ultimately inspiring collection of public and private moments, chronicling a relationship through early romance, building a family, and growing older and dependent. Her poems become a collective meditation on time and the precious aspects of the ephemeral. It is a most poignant journey, filled with gratitude even as grief settles in, for a shared life of devotion and memories. The…
Review by Lara Lillibridge The Presence of Absence: Kitchen table talks about parenting, leaving fundamentalism, and the very messy business of living with loss by Desiree Richter Desiree Richter is a musician, research instructor and dissertation consultant who believes that writing about loss honestly can help us heal. Her love for her children shines in The Presence of Absence, and her frankness about the eternal nature of loss is as refreshing as it is devastating. In the introduction, entitled, “Welcome to this Book!” Richter explains how this book came into existence. These kitchen table conversations began as a…