MER Editor Marjorie Tesser to be Interviewed for Becky Tuch’s Lit Mag News Roundup May 3rd at 11 AM Eastern Click here to read/listen to the interview.
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jane Muschenetz Lviv, Ukraine Long before Reuters and BBC reporters signed off from it, Lviv, Ukraine was my hometown, I knew it by another name—Lvov, Ukrainian Republic, USSR is, like anyone’s childhood, I suppose, a dot on the map of time that no longer exists. None of us can ever go back to our soul’s point of entry into this world… Lviv is/was Ukrainian/Soviet/Russian/Polish/Slavic/Austro-Hungarian territory and all of them hated the Jews more or less equally… You see how tugging one tongue can unspool the entire tapestry? Lvov is the name of my birth city in Russian, which was…
We’re excited to present our twentieth annual issue, themed “Mother Figures.” Issue info Purchase print copy Purchase pdf copy
MER Submissions Open Now MER (aka Mom Egg Review) is open for submissions of literary work on motherhood. We publish poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. You need not be a mother to submit. April 15 – April 22, free “Early Bird” submissions; April 15 – July 15, Regular submissions ($3 fee or free with subscription purchase). Please see Guidelines for more info. https://momeggreview.com/submit
Karolina Zapal My Future Daughter During Adolescence My mother is crazy She passes out copies of her favorite poetry to us every morning with toast. She says I am just like her We both stick our noses in our books, hoping no one important catches us like we were colds I cannot count how many times I have opened a book and not finished it I want to be held firmly by words like an eyelash on my finger in the shower I can’t blow off to make a wish but I feel like a coward cozy, caught on…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg To Set Right is a collection of poems that hovers in time and place, summoning an almost mystical journey of resilience of the self, ancestry, history, and the fragility of the physical realm. Shapiro also connects her Jewish identity to the many revelatory rites of passage in her life, and the events of each of these eighteen poems float and shimmer on the page with the dream-like quality of the airborne subjects of a Chagall painting. The contents and titles of each work run sideways on the page, also presenting a “tilt” in the reader’s…
Review by Jennifer Martelli In the acrostic poem that introduces Michelle Reale’s latest collection, Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily, Professor Alex Otieno writes, “Liminal experiences of: working, loving, hoping, regaling, dancing and singing, summoning.” These poems, written in the voices of refuges from Africa, as well as the voice of the witness, occupy this “liminal space,” a space of confini: borders. Reale unflinchingly examines the borderlands of language, of confinement of the body, and finally, the poetry that witnesses the refugee who flees war, poverty, and environmental disasters that cause “any one of us to leave our home…
Review by Celia Jeffries Today we have a growing genre known as fractured fairy tales and now, in The Daddy Chronicles, we may be experiencing yet another new genre: the fractured children’s story. Not that this memoir is a tale for children, but that it reads like a children’s book. Do not be deceived by the lovely cadence of these short vignettes. Make no mistake: this is not a children’s book, but a book for adults, specifically female adults, specifically female adults who have grown up with absent fathers. The Daddy Chronicles opens with “Ode to the Lone Sperm”:…
Review by Abby Orenstein Ash I once nannied for a wise and sarcastic professor who told me, “This era is absurd. Women are expected to take care of everything in the household, work, and now, they have to get down on the rug and play with their kids.” Having no children at the time, I did not viscerally understand her point, but I was already well aware of the prevailing societal expectation that women, and particularly mothers, are required to wrangle with even more today than in the past. Modern family life is defined by an abundance of cultural…
MER Online Quarterly March 15, 2022 New Poetry Folio – Release Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featured Poets: Marie-Célie Agnant (translated by Danielle Legros Georges) Sheila Clark-Jones Jessica Cuello N.F. Kimball Chrissy Martin Chloe Martinez Tzynya Pinchback Heidi Seaborn Art by Amy Dignan MER News: AWP 2022 Meet-Up/ Book Table/Editors’ Activities