Review by Christine E. Salvatore It took me a long time to write this review and one small reason might be the immense amount of craft and the nuanced beauty that went into these poems. When someone else’s writing calls your own writing skill into question, how to write about that writing? How to explicate those poems? How to rise from immersion in a delicately and thoroughly rendered world full of rhyme and imagery that feels like an elixir every time you read? M.B. Powell’s collection of poems, In Relation to the Surface, surpasses my already high expectations for this…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Viable, Chloe Yelena Miller gives herself space to mourn, celebrate, and atone. This debut full-length collection is a candid chronicle of Miller’s experiences with miscarriage, pregnancy, and new motherhood. Miller finds the melody in the language given to women regarding reproduction and loss. And to address these heavy events in her life, she looks to where she finds comfort: the English and Italian language, food, family, and poetry. Viable begins with the poem “Mid-Thirties.” The language here is easy, inviting, and the perspective borders somewhere between innocent witness and desperation. Here, a toddle hides…
In an extraordinary year, extraordinary voices on mothers, mothering, and motherhood. Mom Egg Review Vol. 19 Order the Print Journal Order a PDF Copy Marjorie Tesser, Editor in Chief Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach, Poetry Editors Contributors
Review by Laura Dennis If I had to choose two words to talk about the past twelve months–let’s make that two constructive words–intersectionality and vulnerability would be strong contenders. Whether it be a deep dive into the work of Brené Brown or a reckoning with structural racism, these two topics have been on many people’s minds. It comes as no surprise, then, that Athena Dixon’s essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, feels so relevant: intersectionality and vulnerability reverberate from page to page. Dixon explores the nuances of what it means to be Black (including how and what kind of…
Review by Sherre Vernon Sharon Tracey is the author of two poetry collections, Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists and What I Remember Most is Everything. Her work has appeared in The Worcester Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Rain Taxi and elsewhere. She currently serves on the board of Perugia Press and is based in western Massachusetts. Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists is collection of poetry offered as sort of live exhibit meant to be attended. As we first enter, we are greeted by epigraphs from Sappho and Simonides of Ceos. Then, between opening and closing remarks offered as single poems, Sharon Tracey tours us through four curated galleries of…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Nancy Gerber’s fictionalized first-person account of a boy coming of age just before the war in Nazi Germany has an authenticity that echoes throughout. Karl is engaging, vacillating between adolescent insecurity, and a beginning awareness of the dangers that many around him seem to ignore. The author, Nancy Gerber, felt compelled to tell her father’s story, fictionalizing what she did not know. As she said in her preface, “My father rarely spoke of his past, and I knew few details of his early life” (xiii). Her research fills in the blanks of what was…
Welcome to the March 2021 VOX Folio: Healing and Recovery In her poem, “I Ask a Pearl Diver to Bring You Back From the Dead,” Joan Kwon Glass writes, Ribbons of seaweed blossom at our feet and nearby mollusks spin sand into pearls. Every darkness we bear hides such small mercies. The poems in this VOX folio cull the darkness of our recent past for small mercies. We are tired, outraged, and grieving. Tina Cane opens her poem “Hold” describing this witnessing: Sometimes +++it’s a shock event+++ in lieu of a total coup an instance more akin+++ to the…
Tina Cane Come Correct Continue to verb Orlando urges me via early morning text I’m trying I write back Continue to create he says as I get out of bed raise the window shade distance means the end of snow days so I make a dozen snowballs and keep them in the freezer after lunch I give my son a stone to tumble in his pocket for when we walk the woods I call it his thinking stone instead of the worrying kind your thoughts are your own I tell him as are mine Pray here, you can…
Erica Charis-Molling Elegy for 12 weeks No lines or smiles on a stick. No calls down the hall to my wife, no calling my mom “Mimi” or to make an appointment. No morning nausea, at least not that I noticed. Did the food in the kitchen compost reach through my nose, up turning my stomach? Or did I taste pennies stolen from an unseen fountain? I wish I could re-member the tiny tubes of your heart or the shadow of your featureless face or the floating webbed paddles stretched out from port and starboard, little boat moored to…
Alexa Doran “I don’t want you to says he’s a killer” Oh honey I am angry too. Hansel and Gretel felt this same gravity when they finally saw through the heady scent of too much peppermint to the gnarl of licorice and bone broth whose steam left their bodies limp as used hankies. Still Americans had so much more warning than two fairy tale children banished to the open axle of forest. I do not want to forgive the President or teach you your cheek is your best defense against men who believe life is better embezzled than …