Review by Carla Panciera By the time Kerrin McCadden’s brother dies of an overdose, she has already rehearsed his death: “There he goes again,” she writes in Keep This to Yourself, a searing collection that examines both the profound individual grief of losing a loved one and the collective tragedy of the opioid epidemic. These sixteen poems rely on the juxtapositions of the “monster” that is addiction and the complexity that is the love between siblings. In the opening poem, “When My Brother Dies”, McCadden writes: In the john boat, my brother and I float and row. +++Water weeds…
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Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Connie Post’s Prime Meridian, I lost count of how many times she used the words “falling” and “broken.” In the poet’s world everything is tenuous. Everything is breaking or about to break, is falling, or about to fall. Motherhood and childhood, two fragile experiences indelibly linked, can be forced into invisibility by a father’s abuse. And yet, the poet stands ready to recognize that “Sometimes a mother is a prayer/an altar upon which your knees break” (26). Post is adept at pulling an imperceptible thread through each poem in the book as if…
Review by Sherre Vernon Megan Merchant is an editor at Pirene’s Fountain and The Comstock Review and holds an MFA from UNLV and is the author Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2017), Grief Flowers (2018) and Before the Fevered Snow (2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Award, the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. Before the Fevered Snow is Megan Merchant’s elegy to the unravelling and eventual loss of a very influential mother. From the early poem “Nesting,” to the whispered 4-line “Elegy” that marks the collection’s final page, Merchant’s…
Review by Laura Dennis In the era of COVID-19, parents find themselves confronting new ways of inhabiting the role of a parent-and. Parent and teacher. Parent and work-from-home employee. Parent and front-line worker. Parent with coronavirus, cut off from those she loves. More than ever, we writers ask, as does Niku Kashef in chapter 8 of Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, Maternity, “How does a person who is never off the clock balance art and life?” (155). Though written in pre-pandemic times, Rachel Epp Buller’s and Charles Reeve’s co-edited anthology often rings true as it explores what it means to…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson When I asked to review this collection, I’ll admit, I’d forgotten exactly what the phrase, “let X equal something” meant, but I knew it was math. I’ve heard of math-based poetry – could this be it? I’ve heard math inclined friends say that proofs were like poetry – again, is the book to finally make that connection for me? A good friend wrote a verse novel for middle schoolers that used coding to structure her poems. Much to my surprise – and excitement, Let X = X is none of these things. Cleveland Wall’s collection…
Review by Michelle Wilbert A number of years ago, I read a book by noted Quaker author Parker Palmer entitled Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. In it, the following seminal quote: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” As I was reading this intelligently probing book of poetry, Asking the Form…
Mom Egg Review Proudly Presents Voices from Home A Virtual Reading from MER 18 – HOME Issue Mom Egg Review celebrates its HOME issue with a virtual reading by contributing writers and poets. When the theme for this year’s issue was set as “Home,” no one had an inkling of how timely the theme would be! But “home’ has always had multiple connotations and meanings— Is a home a place, a feeling, a center, a community? A battleground or refuge? Home land. Home base. Unhoused. Also home neighborhood, others’ homes, away from home. The home you grew up in…
Marjorie Tesser, Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Mom Egg Review Editors welcome you to a very special reading of work from MER 18 – HOME
Lan Tran Sewn From Mom Egg Review 18 – HOME Lan Tran’s writing has previously been anthologized in A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press, 2009) and Waking Up American (Seal Press, 2005). Lan has also also authored three off-Broadway solo-plays and is the recipient of a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Ingrid Wendt Leaving the House From Mom Egg Review 18 – HOME Ingrid Wendt, Leaving the House from Ingrid Wendt on Vimeo. Ingrid Wendt (Eugene, Oregon) and her late husband, writer Ralph Salisbury, once rescued an old house from demolition, moved it across town. and worked on it for many years. Her first book, Moving the House, was published by BOA Editions. Co-editor of In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (The Feminist Press), Wendt’s fifth and most recent book of poems is Evensong. New poems are forthcoming in POETRY and Cold Mountain Review. www.ingridwendt.com.