Review by Tiel Aisha Ansari Robin Rosen Chang’s debut poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes, is filled with birds and water. The very first poem tells us “My Mother Was Water” (3); in the ensuing poems, recurring references remind us of the mother’s pervasive influence on the narrator’s life. Water–specifically, the ocean– is also the setting for several poems that tie together the three main characters of this collection: the narrator, her dead mother, and Eve, who has no mother yet is the mother of all. Eve is explicitly the Biblical figure, accompanied by Adam, the apple, and the serpent,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Maternal as a Strategy What you’re going to do now? The term ‘maternal’ has been pulsing through the academic and contemporary art worlds. Contemporary art institutions seek to cultivate it; scholars write about it, and artists who become mothers are confronted by the concept. A confession: it took me a long time to connect to the term maternal. Even after having my baby girl, the term still felt obsolete. The second time around, as a student at Goldsmiths Uni, I started to read about maternal organizations demanding equality and providing agency to those who mother the other. It became…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Reading Ha Kiet Chau’s full-length poetry collection, Eleven Miles to June, published by Green Writers Press, I often felt the same joy of the search I experience while antiquing. That feeling of being in a space of overlapping generations, locations, crossed time-periods; the velvety, almost sticky feel of golden, spotted ephemeral pages filled with scrolling, somewhat indecipherable script laid down with care. As one of Chau’s speakers says in the eponymous poem, “the poet inside me aches for all things gone” (14). And yet, here is one of the insights of her book: all things are gone,…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Kelli Russell Agodon’s brilliant new collection of poetry, Dialogue with Rising Tides elevates anxiety to a level of redemption. The collection is divided into five sections: Scarweather, Black Deep, Overfalls, Shambles, and Relief. Reverence for the coast unifies these poems. She identifies reasons for optimism in the daily rhythms of the sea, even with rising tides and the continuous menace of outside forces. From familial trauma to alarm about the state of the country and world, her language pivots seamlessly from conversational to lyric. A master at wringing emotion from landscape and mundane daily…
Review by Christine Salvatore In a time of less travel, walls that seem to close in, and a little too much time alone, Andrea Potos’s Marrow of Summer is all we need to journey far from home to tangible and intangible places. From London’s gardens to Monet’s water lilies, the poems in this collection traverse a topography light with hope and grounded in gratitude. The topics of motherhood, loss, resilience, and summer, of course, are interwoven throughout the book which begins with “Before Waking in May” (13), a twelve-line poem that seems to encompass the heart of the collection. There…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez I usually don’t start a review of someone else’s poetry—especially such haunting work as Celia Lisset Alvarez’s—with a reference to my own experience, but I’m no stranger to writing about death, and Multiverses takes up loss, too: the loss of an infant, of a miscarried pregnancy, of a beloved uncle, of a problematic father. When I compare what I’ve had to say with Alvarez’s Multiverses, however, I feel cowardly. I avoided imagining futures for the pregnancies I’d lost because I didn’t want to grieve fiction, but Alvarez? She gives those fictions—those futures—entire poems. In doing…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Object Lesson: A Guide to Writing Poetry by Jennifer Jean is a 25-page teaching manual designed to be used with or without the chapbook Object Lesson by the same author. If you don’t have the book, there are substitute poems listed that are “easily found online.”(3) Jennifer Jean is the founder of Free2Write Poetry Workshops for Trauma Survivors, and this book is based on the curriculum she developed. This guide was designed for use by teachers, book clubs, and workshop facilitators working with trauma-affinity groups. I was interested in this book to develop my own…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Poetry about illness and the journey toward recovery can be the most challenging to write. It is a daunting task to expose the intimate and raw moments of discovery and fear that accompany diagnosis and treatment, and to capture these fragile episodes in language that is eloquent and evocative. Kyle Potvin’s poems in Loosen are both brave and gently lyrical, quietly rendered yet resounding on the page. We feel her unmooring from certainty as she orbits hope, creating reverie from memory and exultation in day-to-day living. In “Diagnosis” (4) the determined music of her words…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson I am a poet and historian. My dissertation examined the relationship between memory, national identity, and race in our public spaces. I am still deeply interested in how we use words, symbols, and the evidence of the past to tell stories about who we are. So, when I opened Poem That Never Ends by Silvina López Medin, I knew I had found a new love. Poem That Never Ends is a fascinating and beautiful work that shapes a narrative about her familial past, present, and future. Using poetry, prose, and image, she builds a way…
Review by Jamie Wendt Anne Graue’s first full-length collection of poetry, Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, expresses the beauty and loss rooted in Kansas. This collection was fittingly published by Woodley Press, a small publishing company dedicated to showcasing Kansas artists and subjects. Divided into three sections, Graue’s book moves from narrative childhood memories in Kansas to lyrical and metaphorical poems revolving around the speaker’s mother in addition to poems about belonging in one’s family. Some poems in the third section bring readers outside of Kansas to Kenya, where the author taught for three years, as well as meditations on parenting…