Mary Specker Stone Eclipse of the Super Flower Blood Moon Not even super moon can catch the toddler tossed in play whose leg the hard floor fractures. Fine China plate, broken moon can’t sleep. Ice cream moon melts in remorse’s heat. Baseball moon hurls hail from the sky. Again and again, the scene pummels mind’s eye. Laundry moon, white as bleached linen, but for this new stain in it, indelible, these new parents think, yet scarcely visible on a lunar scale. We grandmothers tell our own guilty tales: the time we spilled scalding coffee on the baby, or locked…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Christina Hennemann Oma Fine’s Moon Calendar At waning moon, Oma Fine planted potatoes and beets, her stubbly, purple mole trembling. She cut our hair at new moon so it would grow back thicker (my horsehair proof of her science), but she refused to serve red meat, it was fried eggs and ham on bread: ‘Strammer Max’. She never touched a broom when the moon was round. This was the time to twist chicken’s necks, the cock bewitched by the abundance of light, forgetting his egg-laying hens. Chicken soup with Eierstich, brewed with the pull of the moon, mended generations…
Natalie Solmer I Am a Great Lake My youth was Everclear spilling slicking the table, its decks of cards, the phones that didn’t exist in our pockets or hands but Euchre. We learned it in school playing in our plaid skirt uniforms. My friend licked the liquor up. All of us licked the liquor up until I had to stop. Until alcohol became old as me. I am as old as the rusted out mini-van we drove around in, blasting The Score. I am old as the bats that swarmed the summer evenings around the baseball stadium lights, the…
Portuguese- American Writer Katherine Vaz, and Portuguese Artist Madalena Pequito In Conversation With Ana C.H. Silva This June I attended the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the first time I’ve ever been part of a larger Luso/as (Portuguese) gathering beyond family dinners – perhaps if you don’t count that Maritza concert I attended at Carnegie Hall! Our families hailed from the Azores, Portugal, Brazil, and Cape Verde, so we were a diverse group, but we could see especially from our writings that certain strands rooted in language and familial culture connected us. …
I was not given meaning, so I had to make it By Jiwon Choi I can’t say that I was feeling overtly political during the drafting of A Temporary Dwelling, my third poetry collection (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), but I do acknowledge that I am distrustful of the Mainstream Culture seeing how it tries to jam unhelpful messages through my keyhole. A slightly contradictory statement coming from someone whose childhood was taken up with voraciously imbibing what the MC had to offer, primarily in TV form whilst waiting for the parents to get home. Yes, I was a child in…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley New and coming soon: notable books with a focus on motherhood and women’s lives. Joan Kwon Glass, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Perugia Press, September 2024, poetry. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent questions: What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating…
Review by Jordan E. Franklin For those of you new to Sarah Sarai, she is a NYC-based poet and editor with a prolific publication record spanning several collections. While most poets experience a lag in their work and output, Sarai has experienced no such thing as evidenced by her latest book, Bright-Eyed. This new work manages to retain its power, intimacy, and tenderness despite its brevity. According to Dictionary.com, the word “geography” refers to “the topographical features of a region.” Normally, this pertains to physical spaces such as countries and landscapes; Sarai begins Bright-Eyed with a dedication to her…
Review by Elizabeth Brown The Fiction of Stillness is Robyn Hunt’s second collection of poems. Her first collection, The Shape of Caught Water, was published by Red Mountain Press in 2013, winning the New Mexico Press Women’s Association Award in 2014. Additionally, Ms. Hunt has co-written a one-act play with Evangeline Brown which was produced by Theaterwork in Santa Fe, as well as published numerous poems in literary journals. This collection details all aspects of a cancer diagnosis and struggle to beat it. Organized into three sections, the poems highlight the ups and downs of the journey of the…
To you who took flight suddenly: a review by Jennifer Jean In her introduction to Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960-2023, editor Mojdeh Bahar tells us that the jay in the title is a desert crow that is camouflaged while marching on its stout legs but is expressively gorgeous when taking flight. This image is an apt representation of the poets in this exquisitely curated bilingual anthology of Persian poetry by women from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Bahar, in her introduction, and the poets as well, talk of taking refuge in the soaring words…
Review by Jane Ward Imagine walking along a pier with your children. Your daughter points to something, a bird circling the ocean, perhaps, searching for fish. Your eyes leave your young son for one minute, or less–an instant. When you turn back to smile at him, he is gone. Every parent’s nightmare–that a moment’s lapse can result in a forever tragedy–is the premise that launches Cynthia Reeves’s exquisite novel, The Last Whaler, a tale that unfolds within the world of 20th-century Norwegian whaling, against the backdrop of a relentless and unforgiving Arctic. In 1937, whaler Tor Handeland and his…