Michael Montlack Stevie Nicks as Fairy Godmother How we run to her, extending our hearts skinned like knees, knowing she has the bandage. A twirl of gauze. Hoarse from all her hollering: Beware love! Look how it’s sent me spinning! Why—why do we never listen? Mesmerized by the melodies, perhaps we long to hurt … so we might have cause to hide beneath her cape, searching for some secret pocket where she stows the tonic she pours into her songs. Return to “Storied Mothers.” Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections and editor of the Lambda Finalist…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Mireya Perez-Bustillo A Cow Jumped Over the Moon To a bovine dubbed Molly Return to “Storied Mothers.” Mireya Perez -Bustillo’s poetry searches for that “other voice” breaking through entrapment and oppression, the fragile markers to unearth more hidden voices. Her work appears in Caribbean Review, Americas Review, Revista del Hada, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado, was published by Floricanto Press in 2020. She is a Coordinator at the LP2 Program at the Graduate Center-CUNY.
Jeri Theriault Demeter in the sixth stage of grief Return to “Storied Mothers.” Jeri Theriault’s poetry collections include Radost, My Red and the award-winning In The Museum Of Surrender. She is the editor of Wait: Poems From The Pandemic. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals such as The American Journal Of Poetry, The Rumpus, The Texas Review, and The Ashville Poetry Review. A Fulbright recipient and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jeri won the 2019 Maine Literary Award for poetry. www.jeritheriault.com
Sherre Vernon Photograph, As I’d Have You See Me Return to “Storied Mothers.” Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the author two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (fiction), and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and anthologized in several collections, including Bending Genres, Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions. Readers describe her writing as heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. To read more of her work visit www.sherrevernon.com/publications and tag her into conversation @sherrevernon.
Review by Mindy Levokove Rich with irony and conceit, Wonder Electric is a book of poetry which offers a view of life which ratchets up our perceptions, our conceptions and our connections. Elizabeth Cohen brings the reader her message of concern, awareness, and clarity. She heightens and highlights experience with systemic charge and polarity. Her powerful and surprising language attracts and spins, transporting the reader masterfully, as she outlines and underscores her content and concerns. What happens to the natural, abundant life on earth when our species collects and spreads, trying to wrest the reins of control of nature, which…
Review by Anna Limontas-Salisbury Ana C. H. Silva’s While Mercury Fish is a cautionary tale women whisper to each other and sometimes to men, but the men don’t listen. The poems, like whispers, can be mistaken as rumor or disguised, as it’s less respectful twin, gossip. But every ounce of a whisper holds a gram of truth. The truth is women’s lives are vulnerable. These poems and prose read like a woman with her eye on the horizon, right up to the moment she has to escape. In the opening piece “The Best Way I Can Explain It,” the…
Review by Emily Webber If you’ve ever worked an office job or wondered how people endure toiling away in a cubicle farm, you’ll tear through Wendy J. Fox’s linked story collection, What If We Were Somewhere Else. Each story imagines the lives of a group of coworkers at an unnamed corporation. But, beyond that, each of these characters is thoroughly human, searching for what will satisfy them both at work and in their personal lives. The collection opens with “The Book of Names, a Spreadsheet” which serves as an introduction to the characters and the office they inhabit. It…
Jane Yolen Bambi Haiku An old book opens. A fawn loses his mother. Yes, there will be tears. A child ‘s first movie. My age? I was only four. The skunk was no help. I kept on screaming: “Bad men killed Bambi’s mommy.” I was taken home. A week of nightmares. I had to sleep with mother. Oh, Dismal Disney. Return to “Storied Mothers.” Jane Yolen’s 400th book was published in March 2021. Her latest book of adult poetry in November 2021. She writes for children, YA, and adults: picture books, poetry, nonfiction, novels and has won dozens…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Poets are often drawn to the fragile expanses of a landscape—internal or external—and Kelly R. Samuels’ poems seek to capture the ephemeral beauty of existence and place that is in peril as we go about our lives. Her poems give elegant and evocative homage as they serve as cautionary tales in a world of climate change denial and the transformative forces of humanity and nature. Her language skillfully summons a music of shift and flow, the rhythms of expansion and retraction of a changing vista. From “Here’s Now Alteration:” (35) And…
Review by Lara Lillibridge At age thirty-five, Cassandra Lane found herself pregnant after a lifetime of saying she never wanted children. She wrote, “my pregnancy boomeranged me back to my family and our past,” (25) and reawakened a need for her ancestor’s stories, a desire to know her people, long ago erased by white culture. “This work is a hybrid—a romance and a horror, a memoir and a fiction—forged out of what is known and what is unknown.” (1) Lane’s memoir blends her personal narrative with a reimagining of the lives and deaths of her great-grandparents, Burt and Mary…