Golda Solomon my mother figure is jazz anna zack gave me life independence firecrackers announce my arrival round midnight feedings from infant to woman the blues hummed loud ‘til teats of notes chord changes/ jazz woke by a legend with three horns a plenty in his mouth blind and yet all seeing he knew my laugh club smells of stale tobacco sweet sweat and maryjane riffs that jelly rolled up and down keys my hungry mouth found you Monk my jazz mother last flourish of arpeggio on the keyboard tipped hat cash register opened paid by the termini brothers…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Lisa C. Taylor Heirlooms for Annie She darkened windows to halt vertigo, brewed broth from chicken necks for migraines, buried sickness on a plate twenty-two steps from the back door. I imagined her hairnet spun from spider webs. Dust motes saved in a muslin bag. No waste. Great Grandma wore an underskirt, high collar, rollup stockings of flesh-hued cotton. Lip swollen on one side. Loose teeth. Rolling pin and arthritic hands. Kin, not akin. She bent religion to fit, never believed a dishwasher could purify or anyone but God predict a storm but tragedies elbowed past regardless of daily prayers.…
Colette Tennant Tidepools Studying the insistent moon, tidepools are sturdy mothers. They hold parabolas of changing water, cover gray sculpins in the folds of their shadowed skirts, lift stars the color of sunsets toward the only light they will ever know, unfold purple urchins like many-fingered queens. Colette Tennant has two poetry books: Commotion of Wings and Eden and After. Her poems have been included in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Ireland Review and others. She’s thankful for mother figures throughout her life. Colette has three grown children.
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Night Collage is both a love story and a slow dance, opening with the foreboding, In Flew Chaos, a poem that juxtaposes wind that “rearranged the strand” with a knock on the door in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. The events call up a long-ago memory of the poet’s mother letting a woman with a gun into the house and chatting with her at the kitchen table. This narrative of human fragility, all the more apparent during the pandemic, creates a kind of photomontage through time, as the poet recalls other…
Review by Emily Webber When I was a kid, I loved when we drove somewhere at night so that I could look at other people’s houses, lights glowing in the night, and wonder what was going on inside. Something was intriguing about lit-up windows, even if I couldn’t see inside. Particularly driving through certain suburban neighborhoods, the houses looked perfect from the outside. I thought the key to happiness was getting get a place like that when I was older. Kelly Fordon’s short story collection, I Have the Answer, is like wandering through that perfect suburban neighborhood but with…
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…
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…