SWWIM, MER, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices present: Off site. On purpose. Thursday, March 27, 2025, 7:00 PM MG Studio, 1319 W. 11th St., Los Angeles, CA 90015 (Free Admission – Doors Open at 6:30) SWWIM, MER, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices present “Off Site. On Purpose,” a reading featuring many of today’s most celebrated women writers and poets, including Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Jiwon Choi, Natasha Herring, Heidi Seaborn, Ana C.H. Silva, Lesley Wheeler, and more stellar voices! Join us for a night of incredible poetry and prose in downtown LA. MG Studio,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jennifer Barber Writing Too Fast, I Write “Thew” for “The” As if you and I commingled +++++++++in the dark and later the same day I give birth to little baby Thew, +++++++++born in winter under a mauve sky. By early spring he cuts a tooth. +++++++++He sprouts a curl. The yard’s fescue and crabgrass thicken, lapping up the sun. +++++++++Warm in my arms, little baby Thew babbles his lips, laughing as he sees +++++++++a plane overhead, a dove on the roof calling another on a branch. +++++++++He and I flow into you like waves that slide across the sand…
Review by Constance Clark To evoke mother in our thoughts and emotions, rarely do we think of fluidity. More often, stops and starts, bumps in the road, outright rage. I suppose, continuous flow of love could be the anomaly in some mother-daughter relationships. But not mine, nor Nancy Gerber’s deeply honest glimpses into her mother bond in her poetry chapbook Language Like Water. Her retrospective poems drip words of mother-daughter complexity in short quiet poems that taunt a range of emotions, and speak to her success as a poet, a finalist for the Gradiva Award in 2014 with her…
Review by Emily Webber Hotel Impala, Pat Spears’s third novel, tackles a trio of American catastrophes—mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. Her work typically features characters on the margins of society, who many would label as failures and deadbeats, always presented with care, humor, and hard truths. This novel, layered with many different perspectives, shows the complex web mental illness creates over six-year period in the Killian family. The rhythm of the family, whether things are good or bad, is dictated entirely by Leah, who is mentally ill and experiencing psychotic episodes. Her husband, Daniel, struggles to keep up the…
Review by Rebecca Jane A Slow Indwelling features two courageous voices that confront pain with poetry. Megan Merchant, a recent winner of the New American Book Prize and author of Hortensia, in Winter weaves her insights about blood, longing, and wreckage with those of Luke Johnson, a father who lives on the California coast, is the author of Quiver, and was a finalist for the Robert Frost residency. A Slow Indwelling proves that deep conversation between two people, conversation that can explore the revelatory and the dark, is still alive and possible in this age of division and insanity.…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Adrie Rose’s Rupture arrives at a time of profound concern for women’s health issues, and her journey of dealing with an ectopic pregnancy brings a poignant and painful lens to the intricate and intimate details of a life set off-course by a series of startling personal events. With bravery and eloquence, the poet revisits exasperating moments and memories, where the body and desire are betrayed unexpectedly, and the self forges a quiet but determined path forward. The title itself implies a bursting or breach, whether in the body or of our certainty of being loved. There’s…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor With breathtaking originality, Those Absences Now Closest propelled this reader into the visceral world of war and the generational trauma that no one whose ancestry has been victimized can escape. Poet and translator, Dzvinia Orlowsky recycles excerpts from other poets and writers including Oleksandr Dovzhenko, whose work she translated. The cento form is composed of passages taken from other poets and she utilizes this form skillfully. The Desna River runs through both Russia and Ukraine which makes it an apt symbol of connection and separation. Some tributaries are in Russia and some in Ukraine.…
Review by Connie Jordan Green Linda Parsons, native Tennessean, is an editor and a prolific writer of poetry, essays, and plays. To come upon a volume of Parsons’ work is to know one is in for a pleasant, but thought-provoking, visit with a master of the written word. Parsons’ sixth collection, Valediction, a book of poems and small essays dedicated to her “three parents, passed but ever present,” is a treasure trove of details and precise images, the product of a reflective mind sifting through memories from childhood and from the recent past. From the opening poem “Light Around…
Review by Linda McCauley Freeman There is an almost indescribable moment when you first nudge your way into a hoarder’s house. An assault not only of your senses, but also of the very foundation of reality, stability and yes, sanity. About five years ago, I felt that sensation when I tried to open the door to my 90-year-old aunt’s apartment in Queens. I had no inkling of what was to come, no clue to prepare me when the door wouldn’t open more than a foot and I had to slide in sideways. In Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s memoir, Lost Found…
MER Bookshelf – February 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Julia C. Alter, Some Dark Familiar, Green Writers Press, April 2024, poetry Julia C. Alter’s Some Dark Familiar begins as an excavation of the shadow sides of motherhood– often hidden from plain sight and public view. In the collection, Alter turns an unflinching eye on postpartum depression, maternal ambivalence, pregnancy termination, and the complex weaving of sexuality with motherhood. However, the author knows that no shadows are cast without light. Some Dark Familiar also seeks to illuminate the reclaiming of erotic power/true selfhood after giving birth. By the close…