Jane C. Miller I will burn with it I inherit a black mourning cap worn by my grandmother at 16 when her mother died. I am the only one it fits, such an ugly gift, its yarn rough as netted horsehair tied with a black ribbon, made by an unknown woman and passed down through generations to bury husbands, parents, children. Such intimate oppression my grandmother hid in a drawer. To throw it away, bad luck. When I put it on, I become grief’s severe matron, in my eyes the emptiness of frozen fields in Iowa. When crows…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Donna Vorreyer Boundaries A squeal rises from the garden: a rabbit caught on a wire fence while seeking a cluster of greens, the soft church of her body trembling as she churns her legs to wrench them free. When she escapes, she leaves behind a clump of downy coat. Her cry was like a child’s, small yet piercing, reminding me that I dwell forever in the country of mothers. Though my son has aged beyond its borders, this country demands allegiance. His need comes now through miles and screens, a call different from the rabbit, but just as…
Sara Wallace The Perfect Stage — “Be the Least in the Household of God,” Francis of Paola Come and watch me screw up, my son said. So, I went to his school’s concert but the music teacher put him in the back behind the piano, his face shadowed, hidden by the music stand. I sat there clapping for Brittney and tall wide Luna with her rough braid, for slight redheaded Asher and smiling Chip, for bongo drummers and violinists, for sopranos and bass players, my son just outside the lip of the spotlight, the black outline of his hair…
MER at AWP–All the Info! Off site. On Purpose. You’re Invited! Off Site. On Purpose. AWP 2026 Wednesday, March 4, 2026, 7:00 PM Westminster Hall, 519 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (Free Admission – Doors Open at 6:30 PM) SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present: Off site. On purpose. SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present “Off Site. On Purpose,” featuring many of today’s most inspiring women and nonbinary writers and poets! Join us for a night of life-affirming poetry on Wednesday, March…
Off Site. On Purpose. AWP 2026 Wednesday, March 4, 2026, 7:00 PM Westminster Hall, 519 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (Free Admission – Doors Open at 6:30 PM) SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present: Off site. On purpose. SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present “Off Site. On Purpose,” featuring many of today’s most inspiring women and nonbinary writers and poets! Join us for a night of life-affirming poetry on Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 7:00 PM (Doors open at 6:30 PM), Westminster Hall, 519…
Katie Naoum Mud Season The edges of the day thaw too quickly, become sharp, jagged, like my children’s drawings or their cries. My children. They are so very young, so beautiful and difficult. There are moments when new phrases they are testing, eyebrow raises, baby-teethed grins crack the icy shell of our monotony. But the days are mostly a slog in mudsucked boots. Haircuts, snacks, new pants. Demands for all things. Lucky that shorts can last two or even three seasons. Boundaries blur to a soft down. The same as the fuzz on the back of my youngest child’s…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Perforated, Chloe Yelena Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, the poet circles the center of things, observing and remembering. In her hands, words are gathered around portals between the outside and inside as well inside the body of memory, with places for language to land and embed in. Hands that light candles, drop coins in a collection box, mix olive oil and salt; hands that rest under the hand of a child. Hands that fill a jar with anything that needs a container, to be held. Inside these intimate poems, the poet celebrates the details…
Review by Elizabeth Paul Susan Ayres is a poet, translator, and lawyer who teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law. She is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies, a chapbook that journeys through inner and outer landscapes. Ayres’ second chapbook, Red Cardinal, White Snow, explores intergenerational mental illness and family trauma. Dedicated to her mother and daughter, this collection provides glimpses into the lives of these women, both of whom lived with mental illness. It also brings readers into the narrator’s experience as a daughter and mother seemingly tethered to tragedy. Yet the links between mothers…
Review by Mary Ellen Talley We enter Laura Garrard’s debut poetry chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, with “Paddling the Sweet Spot,” a poem in quatrains that introduces readers to strength and strategy in water sports as it instructs how to aim for “a diagonal / In between the edges of waves.” However, that perfection is tenuous and “not easy to maintain” (5). The above hint of metaphor becomes apparent when we read the second poem about this speaker’s cancer diagnosis in “My Body Speaks.” With the first line comes revelation, “I ask my body why…
Review by Melissa Kutsche Hitler and My Mother-in-Law by Terese Svoboda focuses on the life and career of the author’s mother-in-law, Patricia (Pat) Lochridge Hartwell. Hartwell was the first woman hired in news at CBS Radio, worked for UNICEF, and was the first female journalist to report from both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters during WWII. In Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, Svoboda highlights how many of Hartwell’s stories have taken on a legendary quality after years of being told to family and friends. “Sometimes her sons say she lied or at least stretched the truth. She was Texan, what…