Review by Michelle Wilbert In this debut chapbook of poems by Whitney Rio-Ross—a writer and English teacher living in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee—one is immediately struck by the juxtaposition of sturdy, straightforward language wrapped around familiar stories of women from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. A clear kinship with the 1997 tour de force of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, the poems transports these women from relative obscurity—from names and stories that purpose only to show how each played into God’s vision for the world from a notably patriarchal point of view—into their own voices and experiences of living the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Christina Veladota Ellen Stone’s poetry is beautiful and is distressing in its beauty. Winner of the 2013 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest for The Solid Living World, Stone has a prolific publishing history in literary journals and has been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Accolades aside, the power of Stone’s work is evident in her stunning imagery. In her new poetry collection, What Is in the Blood, the musicality of her lines evokes the strong emotional tether that keeps the speaker rooted in her childhood, even as she speaks…
Review by Laura Dennis “Telling the right story at the right time is one way to open the door for everyone,” writes Artress Bethany White in “Hard-Headed Ike: A Paean to Black Boyhood” (148), the eleventh of thirteen essays included in Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity. Talk about the right time to find a story… My copy arrived two months after Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed, three weeks after the first arrests for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, four days after the world watched George Floyd’s murder on video; in other words, right when…
Review by Dayna Patterson In Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s stunning debut collection, readers will witness the marriage of moon and field—that glowing, celestial brilliance intermingled with the lowly furrows of dirt, its harrow and plow and dung. In particular, as a mother and a poet, Wilkinson leans into the difficulty of raising children in a fractious and fraught world. Her poems carry both honey and sting, bitter and tang, sour with reprieves of sweet. In poems like “My Son Says He Has an Owl Inside of Him,” the speaker wonders about the ethics of bringing vulnerable beings into an often…
Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 42nd edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic 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 July 2020: Art by Afrooist, Words Wendy Carolina Franco Art by Sunshine Negyesi aka Afrooist She works across different media, ranging from live performances, painting and sculpture- using the poetry of hammering, beating, pulling, teasing and breaking, to express…
Review by Carla Panciera Sara Rauch’s first collection of stories, Electric Book Award Winner, What Shines From It, begins with an epigraph from an Anne Carson poem, a line of which states that “a wound gives off its own light.” In fact, these pages are populated by women who need healing and by those friends and lovers who, drawn to the light, attempt to heal them. In clear prose and in well structured narratives, Rauch applies the basic lesson of creating a story: begin with what a character wants. But as one of her character’s says, “Hope’s gotten me…
Muriel’s Cyclone Kathy Fish It begins with a snowman who catches Muriel’s eye. It begins with Muriel standing at the drawing room window of her tiny home. The winter cyclones, once rare, are now common, fierce as lions. But Muriel is unfazed. The sirens no longer go off. Muriel misses their godlike wail, a sound that had given her chills even as it soothed her, akin to the effect of a lullaby on an infant. She no longer seeks shelter in the southwest corner of her home. She no longer crouches in a closet holding a skillet over her…
The Return Tara Laskowski Our child was there, and then she wasn’t. A reverse birth, if you will. She was there, and then she went back inside, back to the lava-lamp-like existence, floating, warm, head upside down and skin thin and fragile and wet. We wept and deleted our words, ashamed of the naïve happiness we had felt just days before. Friends and neighbors brought things—tomatoes, asparagus, eggplant, zucchini. They said things that were supposed to comfort—what will be will be, there is always more grass on the other side of the water, any minute now, something will happen.…
Sparrow Mary McLaughlin Slechta Juanetta passed the abandoned house every year since third grade and paid it no mind. She didn’t pass close because now she was in high school, she walked in the street. But one afternoon, when the street was freshly tarred, she was hurrying beside the hedge along the property and without warning pitched forward and vomited. She ducked into the yard to think. Her sister had a baby at fourteen and looked like she was following in those footsteps. Mama never said, “None y’all girls worth a damn,” but inside her head Juanetta heard those…
Giving Up on the Professor Julia Strayer Most of us live underground now, which is fine by me. Under the city, under the streets, because that’s the only place safe for now. Scorching temps and fast fires left the earth coughing up dirt in the wind—too hot to survive above ground. Those of us not rich enough to buy our way out and cluster at the poles have turned into mole rats. It’s cool underground, even as the earth bakes overhead. Sometimes there are cave ins and people die. But I tell myself people died senselessly above ground…