Review by Suzette Bishop In Dear Letters in the Red Box by Sarah Stern, her fourth poetry book, poems lift off from story, memory, dream, everyday experiences, and a deceivingly plain-spoken language, shapeshifting into something ethereal. Reading through a box of her mother’s papers after her passing spurs Stern to ruminate on what was given to her. Among those gifts she shares with the reader are family stories of endurance, Jewish ancestry, New York City, and how to live intentionally and deeply “in a strange factory of trees and words” (54). Her mother’s poems and love letters between her…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason One of the most difficult parts of becoming a mother—even before a baby is born—is the worrying that never, ever lets up. There are worries during pregnancy that continue if and when the baby is born and then as children grow up. Even adult children cause great worry to their mothers, no matter how well adjusted or happy they may seem. Rebekah Denison Hewitt captures these many emotions in her new poetry collection, Creature in Bloom, which comes out just in time for Mother’s Day this year. Hewitt has mostly called the Midwest home and…
Review by Sharon Tracey Both narrative and elegy, Preeti Vangani’s poetry collection Fifty Mothers explores grief and loss triggered by the death of her mother to breast cancer at age 41. With her passing, the poet and her father become “a ministry of less” (1) in a kitchen where take-out replaces home-cooking as the poet remembers and records. Set adrift without the anchor of her mother, Vangani shows us that “mother” is too small a word for what becomes, over time, a matrix of women—including aunts, sisters, mothers-in-law, and cousins who offer a kind of spiritual guidance, appearing in…
Welcome to MER 24, the Mothers & Family Issue! Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around them. Family of heritage, family of birth, family of choice, our greater human family: our families can be sources of support, of exhaustion, of love, of pain. Our families can pass down to us lore or trauma. For MER 24, we are exploring poems, prose, fiction, and artworks that address the role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider with and untangle these familial threads that can heal or hinder. The cover image is by Nan…
Katie Manning The Ghost in My Knees I never met my great grandmother, but she lives in my knees, the way they freeze even on the warmest days, just like hers used to do. She lives in my mouth too, in sayings passed to me by Mom and Granny. Lift up your feet or you’ll lose your boyfriend, I say every time we drive over train tracks, raising both legs slightly, even if I’m the one driving, even if no one in the car has a boyfriend—because that’s not the point. My great grandma said it’s good to…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me, McClelland & Stewart, March 2026, poetry In these searching, spare, and resonant poems, Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail, reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Momma May Be Mad is unlike any memoir I’ve previously read or reviewed. The opening of the memoir pulls the reader into the nonlinear hellscape of the author as she simultaneously battles anorexia, alcoholism, and bipolar disorder. By outward appearance, Kerry Neville looked successful: an attractive woman with a Ph.D. but her anorexia, addiction, and multiple attempts to end her life derailed her for many years. The suicide attempts led to multiple hospitalizations where she was treated with ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and antipsychotic medication. The ECT created gaps in her memory, and those gaps…
Folio Editors Cindy Veach and Anna V.Q. Ross To mother is to live with the constant oscillation between noise (kids, advice, to dos, societal expectations) and silence (naptime, playdates, custody arrangements, estrangement, empty nest). The poems in this folio explore this dichotomy through a soundscape of bees, a whistling kettle, chorus of robins, white static, a children’s chorus, yawping coyotes, the startling jangle of a lock, and the squeal of a rabbit. Meanwhile, silence becomes both refuge and erasure: a closed door, a silent stone, the ghost of a lost constellation, the taste of ginger, a wall of gray…
Rachel Beachy All the Small Things “It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing.” – Jack Gilbert In the long night, the night spent longing for rest – when rest is a thing that must be bargained for, prayed over, in these times when goodness comes as a surprise – I am so tired of being surprised by goodness, by the ways we are all the same. Didn’t I used to kneel in the dirt and save the small stones? The earth- worms in the driveway after a rainstorm? The line…
Jessica Bozek Lost Constellation: Noctua Without drugs I lack the imagination it takes to look up and see an animal in a scattering of stars. Rotate the shapes and a different bird emerges: solitaire, thrush, mockingbird, owl. Pictures overlapped as astronomers competed to colonize the southern sky. One autumn evening in 1822, Hydra’s tail became a perch and Noctua appeared. Words crowd the starlines as the child crowds the mother. I need a bowl / I need a sky. I can’t wash the cherries myself, she complains. Someone always gets the last word. The owl now a ghost…