Review by Sherre Vernon Sharon Tracey is the author of two poetry collections, Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists and What I Remember Most is Everything. Her work has appeared in The Worcester Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Rain Taxi and elsewhere. She currently serves on the board of Perugia Press and is based in western Massachusetts. Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists is collection of poetry offered as sort of live exhibit meant to be attended. As we first enter, we are greeted by epigraphs from Sappho and Simonides of Ceos. Then, between opening and closing remarks offered as single poems, Sharon Tracey tours us through four curated galleries of…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Nancy Gerber’s fictionalized first-person account of a boy coming of age just before the war in Nazi Germany has an authenticity that echoes throughout. Karl is engaging, vacillating between adolescent insecurity, and a beginning awareness of the dangers that many around him seem to ignore. The author, Nancy Gerber, felt compelled to tell her father’s story, fictionalizing what she did not know. As she said in her preface, “My father rarely spoke of his past, and I knew few details of his early life” (xiii). Her research fills in the blanks of what was…
Welcome to the March 2021 VOX Folio: Healing and Recovery In her poem, “I Ask a Pearl Diver to Bring You Back From the Dead,” Joan Kwon Glass writes, Ribbons of seaweed blossom at our feet and nearby mollusks spin sand into pearls. Every darkness we bear hides such small mercies. The poems in this VOX folio cull the darkness of our recent past for small mercies. We are tired, outraged, and grieving. Tina Cane opens her poem “Hold” describing this witnessing: Sometimes +++it’s a shock event+++ in lieu of a total coup an instance more akin+++ to the…
Tina Cane Come Correct Continue to verb Orlando urges me via early morning text I’m trying I write back Continue to create he says as I get out of bed raise the window shade distance means the end of snow days so I make a dozen snowballs and keep them in the freezer after lunch I give my son a stone to tumble in his pocket for when we walk the woods I call it his thinking stone instead of the worrying kind your thoughts are your own I tell him as are mine Pray here, you can…
Erica Charis-Molling Elegy for 12 weeks No lines or smiles on a stick. No calls down the hall to my wife, no calling my mom “Mimi” or to make an appointment. No morning nausea, at least not that I noticed. Did the food in the kitchen compost reach through my nose, up turning my stomach? Or did I taste pennies stolen from an unseen fountain? I wish I could re-member the tiny tubes of your heart or the shadow of your featureless face or the floating webbed paddles stretched out from port and starboard, little boat moored to…
Alexa Doran “I don’t want you to says he’s a killer” Oh honey I am angry too. Hansel and Gretel felt this same gravity when they finally saw through the heady scent of too much peppermint to the gnarl of licorice and bone broth whose steam left their bodies limp as used hankies. Still Americans had so much more warning than two fairy tale children banished to the open axle of forest. I do not want to forgive the President or teach you your cheek is your best defense against men who believe life is better embezzled than …
Sherine Gilmour Good Days Is this a good day? What is a good day? I think this is a good day. I do not know, and I am sad that my son has a mother who can look at the blue sky shattered between orange leaves and feel not knowing. We are driving home from the apple orchard. As far as I could tell, no one whispered behind our backs. No one eyed him as he stimmed. Did he stim? He probably stimmed. I do not remember, and that not remembering is like a good day. Is he…
Joan Kwon Glass I Ask the Pearl Diver to Bring You Back From the Dead Joan Kwon Glass is author of How to Make Pancakes For a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) and current Poet Laureate for Milford, CT. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, Literary Mama, Rattle, SWWIM, Porcupine Lit, The Wild Word, Lantern Review, South Florida Poetry Journal & others.
Dara-Lyn Shrager Twenty-One My child no longer calls this place home but my name is mother. I drive toward his apartment in the metal north, into the clang of a city with its trapdoors and sooted drifts. A week’s worth of mail blocks the door I push. Inside, I water the pincushion cactus where its pink eyes have withered shut. How I remember the white stove, the whiter tub. Noodles, laundry, tick of time. I tell my son twenty-one should feel something like powerful. He just says trying. I think I believe in his human body, the best…
Sarah Dickenson Snyder What is Unseeable and Real That vibration in the space between me and someone I love or maybe not love or maybe not even know, like a stranger sitting next to me on a plane and we find we have the same book and I tell her something I’ve never told anyone before and when I take my bag from overhead and walk on earth again something stays, as if my blood and bones felt it, and with me and my children, not any distance in the beginning, that sharing of skin, of course the divine…