Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In her debut book, Cosmic Pockets, Joann Renee Boswell’s poetry is kinetic and visceral. Interspersing poetry with original photography, her words seem to lift off the page and the reader is immediately suctioned into a raucous, effervescent and hopeful world. Whimsical in tone, yet entirely meditative, these poems sparkle with the recognition that even with chaos there is growth and progress. Boswell is fearless in experimenting with poetic form using calligrams and concrete structures. Enchantingly apropos amidst the calamitous rioting, and careless deliberations of the current administration, Boswell’s poetry seems to pull back to…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett Escape of Light is Deborah Kahan Kolb’s second chapbook of poetry. She is the recipient of several awards, for both her poetry and her essays. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online publications. Her artistic voice arises from her upbringing within the insular world of Hassidic Judaism, and a well-developed (and keen) sensibility for the human condition. Much of the work in Escape of Light focuses on aspects of womanhood, relationship, growth and emergence. Her wit and artistry are intertwined in sometimes complex, sometimes heartbreakingly innocent, poems that explore as they expose…
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker Review by Lara Lillibridge Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning writer, poet, translator, and critic. She is the recipient of the Roger Caillois and Anna Seghers Prizes, and the only two-time winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. She is currently distinguished professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Houston. Sarah Booker is a Spanish-to-English translator and PhD candidate at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research revolves around contemporary Latin American narratives and translation studies. This book is an act…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson I’m a fan of poetic forms. Haiku. Sonnet. Pantoum. The elusive sestina. I think there is something magical that happens when a poet jumps into a scaffolding. The scaffolding lifts us, readers and author, to unique connections and dramatic conclusions. Which makes Alice in Ruby Slippers, a collection of poems by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, an unexpected adventure. The mixing of tales in its titles signifies we’re going on a journey of what we think – on entirely new and independent paths, devised by Grellas, just as she’s modifying the poetic forms to suit her…
Review by Jamie Wendt Award-winning writer Amy M. Clark centers the poems in her new stunning collection, Roundabout, on both the turbulence and the joys of motherhood. Roundabout is rooted in the ways that memory and childhood impact the speaker’s desire to save her son from life’s dangers. Divided into four untitled sections, the book roughly moves chronologically, but memory always seeps into the moment that Clark is dissecting, just as it does in real life. Clark begins by highlighting the constant worries a mother feels, ranging from how to soothe a crying baby to the heightened risks of…
Review by Sandra Anfang Gail Newman’s new poetry collection, Blood Memory, is an emotionally challenging and essential reading experience. It chronicles the ongoing effects of the Holocaust on the author and her family across generations. By turns arresting, chilling, tender, simple, and heartbreaking, the writing is consistently lean and starkly honest. The narrator leads us through her own childhood, young adulthood, and middle age, faithfully carrying the burden and responsibilities of memory. Newman is no stranger to poetry or publication. A long-time poet, she has worked as a California poet-teacher with California Poets in the Schools and as the…
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth I am reading Leah Naomi Green’s The More Extravagant Feast for the fourth time, as I prepare to enter my fifth month of Covid-induced social distancing. It is especially good to have at this time, as her poems possess a radiance and quiet calm that bear witness to a life lived, in Thoreau’s sense, deliberately—a word with etymological roots in “weighed well,” “balanced,” “carefully consulted,” and most significantly, “freeing, liberating.”1 Green homesteads with her husband and two small daughters outside Lexington, Virginia, and The More Extravagant Feast bears witness throughout to the discipline demanded by…
Guest Editor Keisha-Gaye Anderson is a Jamaican-born poet, writer, visual artist, and media professional based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of Gathering the Waters (Jamii Publishing 2014), Everything Is Necessary (Willow Books 2019), and A Spell for Living, which received the Editors’ Choice recognition for the Numinous Orisons, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and is forthcoming from Agape Editions this fall. She is a past participant of the VONA Voices and Callaloo writing workshops, a former fellow of the North Country Institute for Writers of Color. Keisha has been published widely in a number of literary…
Submissions on Range of Motherhood Do you believe your experience of mothering is underrepresented in publishing? Joline Scott-Roller, guest editor, is seeking submissions for a MER VOX Quarterly folio on the theme of “Range of Motherhood,” fiction/CNF (850 words) and poetry. Esp. looking for work by/about WOC and LGBQT+ communities, but also looking for other underrepresented voices in Motherhood literature. Submissions open until July 31st, please email [email protected] for more details.
Athena Dixon On Writing The Incredible Shrinking Woman The Incredible Shrinking Woman opens with an essay, “A Goddess Makes Platanos,” that takes places in the center of chaos and redemption. In the mind of the woman who experienced it, the disjointing of time is jarring, but in the mind of an editor it sets the stage for all that comes afterwards. It gives readers a view of what they can expect from the narrator, both insecurity and untapped power. Giving up expectations of what the sequence should be allows the book to manifest in its natural form. In some…