Bruce Moody The Embrace Its wings, its ribs, shoulders, its skin have a mind that desires — as the fires of spring desire — to be held, close, firm, firmly by hands. Hold me, hold me the flesh choirs, it solos, it arias and wails. The body knows its want. In the red breakfast nook in the kitchen one Sunday evening after supper. On one red bench, his brother and he. His brother against the wall. He on the outside. On the red bench opposite, his mother against the wall. His father on the outside. Light…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett , Katie Manning’s website bio starts with “Upon first seeing a rhinoceros at the zoo at age 2, I said to my mom, ‘I want to be one of those when I grow up!’ I have settled for being a poet.” Author of five chapbooks and one full-length poetry collection, as well as multiple award-winner and founder/editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review, she has conclusively done more than ‘settle.’ Her poetry resonates at a gut level, as much for its content as for its simple, unadorned, straight from the heart language. While I have yet to…
Congratulations and best wishes to Emma Bolden (“Assumption”) and Kathy Fish (“Muriel’s Cyclone”)! Their pieces from “Riding the Dangerous Wave,” an MER VOX folio curated by Tara L. Masih, have been selected as finalists in fiction for “Best of the Net.”
Review by Julia Lisella Laura Page is a visual artist as well as a poet, and that sensibility of the visual comes through in this collection, not so much through the imagery Page chooses, but through this poet’s faith and pleasure in the physicality of text itself, the very shapes of particular words on the page, the textures of sound. Dove, Coyote is Page’s first full length collection, winning the Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry in 2019, selected by Dorothea Lasky. The poems are spare with most poems no longer than 5 or 6 lines. The collection is…
Review by Carole Mertz Motherland moves me more than any poetry I’ve read in recent months. Through Sally Thomas’s lines we experience Life as God’s sacred offering to us, and ordinary living, a kind of sacred offering in return. This giving and receiving, both ordinary and extraordinary, is present in almost all of Thomas’s poems, no matter what poetical form the author chose. (She uses the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, and other forms.) A memorable poem opens the collection. Thomas presents “Change-Ringing” (3) in six beautifully rhymed quatrains; the subject, a woman, recalls a time of nursing a child.…
Review by Laura Dennis At its best, flash fiction is a powerful alchemy that combines the best of poetry and narrative. It is also a perfect genre for the present time, when uncertainty and fear have robbed so many of us of our capacity for sustained attention. Still, when I read the structural premise of The Bitter Kind–a series of flash pieces with alternating storylines, written by two different authors–I had questions. How would the compact nature of flash interact with the demands of a longer form, even a “novelette”? I needn’t have worried. Tara Lynn Masih and James…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor What initially struck me about Rise Wildly by Tina Kelley was the imaginative titles of her poems. Titling poems is an art form, and Tina Kelley does it well. Who wouldn’t want to read a poem called “I’m Having the Death I’d Always Hoped For” or “Help. My Mother is Dead. I Feel Light”. The collection is divided into five sections with distinct thematic differences, yet all of the poems are anchored in singular moments of reverence and horror, tempered by the larger mystery of why we are here. The launch into the collection includes…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Shakira Croce’s debut poetry chapbook, Leave It Raw, there is an awareness of the inevitable cyclical journey of life. Though the poems are organized in a linear manner, unfolding from youth to motherhood, there is an underlying cognizance that life, no matter where it begins and ends, is always an odyssey of circularity. Interlaced with this circularity is a profound exploration of the definition of home. From her childhood in rural Georgia to the bustling and near-overwhelming urbanity of New York City of her adulthood, Croce guides the reader through mesmerizing memories and encounters…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Forget Russia is a novel told in two perspectives, that of Anna, a twenty-two-year-old American student, and her grandmother, Sarah, who is living in Russia right before the Russian revolution. Anna’s story is told in first person, and we follow Sarah from a third person point of view. Each section is separated by a full page with the chapter title, followed by either a poem if it’s Anna’s chapter, or a quote from a famous Russian if it is Sarah’s chapter. In this way, each voice is distinct and the reader is never confused by…
Review by Sherre Vernon Jen Stewart Fueston is the author of two chapbooks, Latch (2019) and Visitations (2015), and of the full-length collection considered here: Madonna, Complex (2020). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Her work has appeared widely, in such publications as AGNI, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ruminate, MER and The Christian Century. Fueston is the mother of two young sons and has taught writing internationally. In the audacity of its title, Madonna, Complex asks that we come equipped for exegesis. Before we read her first line of poetry,…