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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Review by Cameron Walker As I read Samina Najmi’s moving essay collection, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, I was reminded of a game we played as children in our school library. We’d gather around the globe and set it spinning. Then, one by one, we’d set out fingers down and imagine the lives we’d make wherever the globe had stopped. The globe spins and stops and spins again throughout this collection: here on the grandparents in India; there on Najmi’s childhood in Karachi; now London, then back again to Pakistan. These essays follow…
Review by Emily Webber The characters in Suzanne Kamata’s short stories in River of Dolls are often caught between cultures, wishing for things they don’t have, and in transit to their next job, relationship, or new home. Big things happen quietly as they navigate everything from small disappointments to major life changes. Good intentions often don’t produce the desired results. Kamata, the author of another short story collection and several novels and nonfiction books, has spent half her life in Japan. Most of the stories in River of Dolls are set there, focusing on women and girls, where ordinary…
MER Bookshelf Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Preeti Vangani, Fifty Mothers, River River Books, February 2026, poetry Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker’s Bombay home. Pierced with joy, with music and sweat, traffic and smoke, the collection layers family dynamics, gender roles, and the pain and pleasure of the speaker’s body, while drawing a living, lyric line between the “gone mother” and daughter. These poems are the fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs for the grown children of mothers living in a world that…
This year, MER is examining the ins and outs of mothers with families, both online and in our forthcoming print issues. Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around us. Family of heritage, family of birth, family of choice, our greater human family: our families can be sources of support, of exhaustion, of love, of pain. Our families can pass down to us lore or trauma. We are exploring creative writing and art that addresses our role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider with and untangle these familial threads that…
Zoraida Haibi Mother and Daughter Zoraida Haibi was born and raised in New York City, NY and moved to Miami, FL where she grew up and currently lives. Haibi’s work encompasses the dynamics of relationships with the figures by infusing symbolic imagery and mixed media objects. These images are “quilted” together to compose an allegorical composition.
Jerrice J. Baptiste Two Images Top, “Pregnant Mother and Daughter in Enchanted Garden” Bottom, “Pregnant Mother and Son on Exotic Beach at Sunset” Jerrice J Baptiste is an artist, poet, author of nine books. Her watercolor drawings on paper have been accepted in Las Laguna Art Gallery exhibit in California, MER, Spirit Fire Review, Jerry Jazz Musician Magazine, Synchronized Chaos. Jerrice has been featured in August- September 2025 as a solo artist at The Mountain Top Library in Tannersville NY and will exhibit again on January 2026, also at The Duck Pond Gallery Port Ewen, NY, March 2026.
Sally Stanton Family Tree Sally Stanton holds an MFA from Pine Manor College and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been shown in exhibitions around New England including the Portland Museum of Art, Waterfall Arts, Harlow Center for the Arts, New Hampshire Art Association Biennial, select galleries, and public libraries. Her abstract figurative narratives reflect dreams, memories, and the human stories that filter in from the unquiet world. She lives in Northport, Maine.
Narmin Kassam Beautiful Voice Narmin Kassam is a Canadian mixed-media artist whose layered collage works on wood panels explore women’s empowerment, cultural identity, and intergenerational memory. Using handmade paper and paint, her practice merges personal narrative with themes of resilience and belonging. Kassam has exhibited across Canada and internationally, with solo exhibitions and public murals in major cities. Her work has been widely published, and she was a finalist for the 2025 Women United Art Prize (Fibre & Collage).