Review by Tasslyn Magnusson It’s a bold and beautiful move to open your poetry collection with a poem about the big bang that lands the reader with the narrator in kindergarten at its close. But there is a gorgeous rhythm of the opening poem’s final line, “First I was a star, then a stain of water, then a kindergartner,” (3). That kind of telescoping is what seals the deal for me. I zoom to the intimate and personal because I’m following Sarah M. Sala’s confident use of language, image, and sound. And we need to be at the intimate…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Ellen Meeropol In her debut novel, Celia Jeffries writes parallel narratives of Alice George: 18-year old Alice living with the Tuareg tribe in the Sahara on the cusp of World War I, and 76-year-old Alice in London who has hidden that life from her husband and family. The two lives collide when the older Alice receives a telegram that Abu has died in the desert, and their “progeny” will arrive in six days. “Who is Abu?” her husband Martin asks. “My lover,” Alice answers. Alice’s secret is at the center of this novel, a blend of historical…
Review by Cammy Thomas If I remember correctly, there’s a moment in the movie Zorba the Greek when the callow English youth asks Zorba, the wise old Greek, whether he’s married. Zorba, with some humor, says he’s a man and a fool, so of course he’s married, “wife, children, house, everything—the full catastrophe!” Emily Mohn-Slate’s The Falls is a woman’s take on this full catastrophe. (Perhaps it has a little something in common, also, with the English tv comedy, Catastrophe, about a man and woman who decide to try to raise the child when she unexpectedly becomes pregnant.) In…
Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 44th edition of this scholarly discourse. Literature intersects with art to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA #artandmotherhood March 2021: Art by Alexis Soul-Gray, Poetry by Iris Jamahl Dunkle ART Alexis Soul-Gray More images can be seen at Procreate Project Artist’s Statement – Alexis Soul-Gray My practice is concerned…
Care A MER VOX Folio of Poetry and Prose “Care” is a word with many shades of meaning. Although not strictly a contronym, it is a “Janus word” of a sort, in that it gazes out in opposing directions. Care encompasses both nurture and travail, the bestowal of affection and the consequences of its withholding; there is care we take or give and are or aren’t given. There are cares we endure, survive. Deep in the heart of winter, as we celebrate romantic love, it seems appropriate also to explore areas of the heart made tender by…
Rebecca Brock Chocolate Heart, Valentine’s Day 2018 Unfurling small fingers, loosened with sleep, I find a fistful of melted chocolate—a heart: heated, sweet. I am careful. I warm the water, fold the cloth, and try to clean the cup of your palm without waking you— I know what it is to love some small thing too much, the way the neighbor boy caught fireflies and moths, the way, when I was your age, I accidentally clasped that butterfly and realized, it wouldn’t fly again. When your brother was your age he came home safe— but it changed the way…
Wendy Brown-Báez Weathering The Storm In the 1980s, I was part of a group that lived off-grid in the countryside of eastern Oregon. We shared a dilapidated barn, a cabin and a main building on five acres at the edge of a pine forest. A road curved close enough for passing cars to be seen through the trees, but it felt secluded and safe. A stream ran across the property where one of us caught a fish in his hands. The buildings were heated by wood stoves and cutting and stacking wood was a chore all took turns…
Lorraine Currelley A Woman’s Legacy ancient women dream of love, passion, tender touch and thirsty kiss. we’ve known murdered rainbows and aching bed. there is no escaping naked heart and mourning. this legacy we carry as women. we know the storms that come threatening and invading our peace. i was a woman long before becoming a wife and mother. your dreams are not unlike my own, nor are they newly spun. we are the gray crowned women you will become. buried in each wrinkle are centuries of life lived. cuddle at our bosoms, sit at our feet and listen.…
Erin McGuff-Pennington She Knew Nowadays all it takes is Call the Midwife, one glass of wine, and I’m an overflowing tub of emotions, soupy water sloshing over the sides. I doubt there’s an end to it—other than the very end—but it’s clear Week 13 was the start. “Your baby’s the size of a lemon!” the app cheered on Sunday. On Monday, an ultrasound. The doctor was grim. “Abnormal,” she frowned, slipping into the room. She pumped Purell, squinted at the screen. “But sixty percent chance the fetus survives and it’s nothing.” She might as well have dangled me off a…
Aimee Pozorski It’s Nothing You Did A woman is most vulnerable flat on her back, knees to her chest, panties dropped to the floor. Darkness surrounds her as the room’s shadows whisper. A wand scans the woman suspicious of doctors since decades ago a resident got stoned and joked about breasts. Today’s doctor is young, completing her residency in Atlanta, disgruntled at this Emory hospital, mumbling something about politics, the patient pool, the South. The lights go up and the darkness comes, flooding the room with the question: “Has everything else been normal?” Else. The doctor speaks of…