Natali Bravo-Barbee – Flores de Femicidio The Prussian Blue cyanotype flowers of Natali Bravo-Barbee looked steadily at me from the wall. Part of the If Only exhibit at the Olive Free Library, the blue and white florals, each entirely themselves, intimated a deeper story. A body tag, shaped like those found in a morgue, hangs down from each Femicide Floral. Each tag names one of the 327 Argentinian women murdered by men in 2019. Sometimes found in trash cans by their loved ones, thrown away in the violence borne of the “machismo, jealousy, sense of superiority and entitlement,” their perpetrators usually are not punished for their crime.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Welcome to MER VOX Quarterly – Spring 2021 Just in time for spring, we present an issue of MER VOX that looks forward to renewal, even as it acknowledges the inequities and hardships that continue to plague our world. In the face of sorrow, it’s revolutionary to preserve hope. In the face of injustice, it’s compassionate to remember and hold space for those damaged or lost. May this spring fulfill your hopes for growth and joy! POETRY FOLIO Healing and Recovery Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featuring: Tina Cane, Erica Charis-Molling, Alexa Doran, Sherine Gilmour, Joan Kwon…
Review by Carole Mertz Each poem in I Wish My Father is written in three-line stanzas. Through these poems, the author portrays a loving relationship with a father who is in decline. In the process, we also gain glimpses of her mother who shared more than sixty years of life with her father. The narratives are strong in their revelations of the father’s character, his relationship with his work, his family, his habits, and his encroaching senility. Always the first line of the poem also provides its title. This technique often serves a double purpose, making us think twice…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg If home is where the heart is, the poems in Matryoshka Houses scaffold into a nuanced and poignantly structured life of love, loss, hardship, and gratitude. Collectively, Pattison’s poems provide a tour of intimate and magnified moments layered through time and in memory. Their imagery and descriptive elegance create a sense of immediacy, from scene to wistful scene, home to home, each summoned in rich detail. In the beginning, there’s “My Pyramid,” (11) the poet’s thoughtful recollection of homes that cumulatively shape her existence and gradually merge through each stage of life. We are told…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson It’s a bold and beautiful move to open your poetry collection with a poem about the big bang that lands the reader with the narrator in kindergarten at its close. But there is a gorgeous rhythm of the opening poem’s final line, “First I was a star, then a stain of water, then a kindergartner,” (3). That kind of telescoping is what seals the deal for me. I zoom to the intimate and personal because I’m following Sarah M. Sala’s confident use of language, image, and sound. And we need to be at the intimate…
Review by Ellen Meeropol In her debut novel, Celia Jeffries writes parallel narratives of Alice George: 18-year old Alice living with the Tuareg tribe in the Sahara on the cusp of World War I, and 76-year-old Alice in London who has hidden that life from her husband and family. The two lives collide when the older Alice receives a telegram that Abu has died in the desert, and their “progeny” will arrive in six days. “Who is Abu?” her husband Martin asks. “My lover,” Alice answers. Alice’s secret is at the center of this novel, a blend of historical…
Review by Cammy Thomas If I remember correctly, there’s a moment in the movie Zorba the Greek when the callow English youth asks Zorba, the wise old Greek, whether he’s married. Zorba, with some humor, says he’s a man and a fool, so of course he’s married, “wife, children, house, everything—the full catastrophe!” Emily Mohn-Slate’s The Falls is a woman’s take on this full catastrophe. (Perhaps it has a little something in common, also, with the English tv comedy, Catastrophe, about a man and woman who decide to try to raise the child when she unexpectedly becomes pregnant.) In…
Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 44th 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 March 2021: Art by Alexis Soul-Gray, Poetry by Iris Jamahl Dunkle ART Alexis Soul-Gray More images can be seen at Procreate Project Artist’s Statement – Alexis Soul-Gray My practice is concerned…
Care A MER VOX Folio of Poetry and Prose “Care” is a word with many shades of meaning. Although not strictly a contronym, it is a “Janus word” of a sort, in that it gazes out in opposing directions. Care encompasses both nurture and travail, the bestowal of affection and the consequences of its withholding; there is care we take or give and are or aren’t given. There are cares we endure, survive. Deep in the heart of winter, as we celebrate romantic love, it seems appropriate also to explore areas of the heart made tender by…
Rebecca Brock Chocolate Heart, Valentine’s Day 2018 Unfurling small fingers, loosened with sleep, I find a fistful of melted chocolate—a heart: heated, sweet. I am careful. I warm the water, fold the cloth, and try to clean the cup of your palm without waking you— I know what it is to love some small thing too much, the way the neighbor boy caught fireflies and moths, the way, when I was your age, I accidentally clasped that butterfly and realized, it wouldn’t fly again. When your brother was your age he came home safe— but it changed the way…