Review by Sherre Vernon Jen Karetnick is a widely published, award-winning poet, essayist, and journalist. She earned her MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. She is a co-founder/co-editor of the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day (www.swwim.org) and the author of five full-length poetry collections: Hunger Until It’s Pain; The Burning Where Breath Used to Be, The Treasures that Prevail, American Sentencing and Brie Season. Recent recognition of her work includes: the 2020 Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Award and the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Best Microfiction 2021 edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke, guest edited by Amber Sparks A Micro Review by Celia Jeffries Don’t judge a book by its size. This anthology, in keeping with its content, is the size of a postcard. There was a time when people packed a whole story on a postcard, recounting travels and experiences, telling others of the worlds they’ve discovered. Open up Best Microfiction 2021 and you’ll discover whole worlds in less than 400 words. Some are pure poetry. “Instructions for cleaning a mirror” by Sarah Freligh (57) begins with four words: “I have my…
Review by Sara Epstein Karren LaLonde Alenier, author of How We Hold On, has written seven previous collections of poetry, including The Anima of Paul Bowles, chosen by the Grolier Bookstore of Boston, MA as a 2016 staff pick. Her collection Looking for Divine Transportation won the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature. Alenier also collaborated with composer William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes to write the jazz opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, which premiered at New York City’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia in June 2005. The book is divided into four…
Review by Tiel Aisha Ansari Robin Rosen Chang’s debut poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes, is filled with birds and water. The very first poem tells us “My Mother Was Water” (3); in the ensuing poems, recurring references remind us of the mother’s pervasive influence on the narrator’s life. Water–specifically, the ocean– is also the setting for several poems that tie together the three main characters of this collection: the narrator, her dead mother, and Eve, who has no mother yet is the mother of all. Eve is explicitly the Biblical figure, accompanied by Adam, the apple, and the serpent,…
Maternal as a Strategy What you’re going to do now? The term ‘maternal’ has been pulsing through the academic and contemporary art worlds. Contemporary art institutions seek to cultivate it; scholars write about it, and artists who become mothers are confronted by the concept. A confession: it took me a long time to connect to the term maternal. Even after having my baby girl, the term still felt obsolete. The second time around, as a student at Goldsmiths Uni, I started to read about maternal organizations demanding equality and providing agency to those who mother the other. It became…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Reading Ha Kiet Chau’s full-length poetry collection, Eleven Miles to June, published by Green Writers Press, I often felt the same joy of the search I experience while antiquing. That feeling of being in a space of overlapping generations, locations, crossed time-periods; the velvety, almost sticky feel of golden, spotted ephemeral pages filled with scrolling, somewhat indecipherable script laid down with care. As one of Chau’s speakers says in the eponymous poem, “the poet inside me aches for all things gone” (14). And yet, here is one of the insights of her book: all things are gone,…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Kelli Russell Agodon’s brilliant new collection of poetry, Dialogue with Rising Tides elevates anxiety to a level of redemption. The collection is divided into five sections: Scarweather, Black Deep, Overfalls, Shambles, and Relief. Reverence for the coast unifies these poems. She identifies reasons for optimism in the daily rhythms of the sea, even with rising tides and the continuous menace of outside forces. From familial trauma to alarm about the state of the country and world, her language pivots seamlessly from conversational to lyric. A master at wringing emotion from landscape and mundane daily…
Review by Christine Salvatore In a time of less travel, walls that seem to close in, and a little too much time alone, Andrea Potos’s Marrow of Summer is all we need to journey far from home to tangible and intangible places. From London’s gardens to Monet’s water lilies, the poems in this collection traverse a topography light with hope and grounded in gratitude. The topics of motherhood, loss, resilience, and summer, of course, are interwoven throughout the book which begins with “Before Waking in May” (13), a twelve-line poem that seems to encompass the heart of the collection. There…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez I usually don’t start a review of someone else’s poetry—especially such haunting work as Celia Lisset Alvarez’s—with a reference to my own experience, but I’m no stranger to writing about death, and Multiverses takes up loss, too: the loss of an infant, of a miscarried pregnancy, of a beloved uncle, of a problematic father. When I compare what I’ve had to say with Alvarez’s Multiverses, however, I feel cowardly. I avoided imagining futures for the pregnancies I’d lost because I didn’t want to grieve fiction, but Alvarez? She gives those fictions—those futures—entire poems. In doing…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Object Lesson: A Guide to Writing Poetry by Jennifer Jean is a 25-page teaching manual designed to be used with or without the chapbook Object Lesson by the same author. If you don’t have the book, there are substitute poems listed that are “easily found online.”(3) Jennifer Jean is the founder of Free2Write Poetry Workshops for Trauma Survivors, and this book is based on the curriculum she developed. This guide was designed for use by teachers, book clubs, and workshop facilitators working with trauma-affinity groups. I was interested in this book to develop my own…