Tsaurah Litzky The Sweet Potato Plant When I was little my mother and I lived with my father’s parents in their house in Brownsville, Brooklyn. My mother told me my father was away in France fighting in a big war to save the world from a bad man named Hitler. She showed me a picture of my father smiling, wearing his soldier’s uniform. He looked nice. One day my mother and I went to the Woolworths on Pitkin Avenue to buy me my first coloring book and crayons. The Woolworths had a plant section. My mother told me to pick…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Mindy Kronenberg In Where The Eye Wants Coast, her eighth collection of poetry, Linda Opyr presents poems that are quietly but powerfully wrought, a collection of transformative moments summoned by life’s seasonal gifts and losses. Published as Covid-19 was emerging as our contemporary crisis, these poems hold a special poignancy for their reverence of the ephemeral nature of existence and those rites of passage that become more precious even as they recede with time. Opyr’s craft is in creating lines that shimmer like gossamer while they gently anchor the reader to the intangible aspects of our lives.…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Lori Desrosiers’ third full-length poetry collection, Keeping Planes in the Air builds a narrative about the ways in which family history plays out in the most mundane of moments. The poet grapples with power and perceived power, like a mother conjuring safety for her children when they fly, praying that the planes would stay aloft. The rational and irrational trade stories as family legends are passed through generations. The poem, “My Grandmother Shoplifted” tells a story of longing for glitter and trinkets, perhaps as the grandmother’s mental acuity deteriorates. This longing for power, both…
Review by Carla Panciera Veronica Montes’s The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting, winner of Black Lawrence Press’s Spring 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition, includes eight pieces of flash fiction. Her first collection, Benedita Takes Wings and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Philippine American Literary House. Though Montes’s rich language and startling imagery are arresting, it is the women themselves who compel the reader. Perhaps it is the rigid requirements of the genre, but these characters do feel isolated. Thus, an intimacy exists between them and the reader. Montes’s stories are also reminiscent of the oral…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor A Place Remote by Gwen Goodkin is a debut short story collection populated by unique characters that embody small town America. Life’s tragedies are on display in these stories, as random acts determine the individual character’s direction. If there was a theme for this collection, it might be the the unpredictability of life and the certainty of death. In the story, “A Boy with Sense”, a young boy witnesses his father’s drinking and infidelity leading to the breakup of his parent’s marriage. Carter finds a role model in Poppy, his grandfather who lives and…
Review by Janet McCann As a crone poet whose childbearing years are decades past and mostly forgotten, I found this collection brought everything back graphically. The physical and metaphysical elements of childbirth became real again—hyper-real. The poems evoke strong body imagery that resounds with soul-deep reverberations. The sensory images pleased me immensely, though they did not make me want to go through that experience again. It is also satisfying to read a sequence of poems that represents a personal narrative that is also a shared women’s story, a myth that is also a truth. Samantha Kolber received her MFA…
MER Vox Quarterly – Winter 2020 December 15, 2020 Mother is Speaking: An MER VOX folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Mother is speaking. She is the quiet voice that speaks the loudest, especially when we are out of balance. From state violence to a global health crisis, the call for healing is louder than ever. These poems and stories speak from the perspective of the cosmic, divine, limitless mother. The mother who lives in the ocean, the trees, in every form of life on the planet, and also within the deepest depths of our subconscious mind. Mother is speaking.…
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Mother is Speaking: An MER VOX folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Mother is speaking. She is the quiet voice that speaks the loudest, especially when we are out of balance. From state violence to a global health crisis, the call for healing is louder than ever. These poems and stories speak from the perspective of the cosmic, divine, limitless mother. The mother who lives in the ocean, the trees, in every form of life on the planet, and also within the deepest depths of our subconscious mind. Mother is speaking. These works reveal what she has to say about where we’ve…
Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali Miracle Again we split open and don’t die life crowns from within every woman every where Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali is an actor, director, playwright, and producer. She has worked off-Broadway and in regional theater nationwide and is currently Associate Professor of Theater for Social Transformation at the UMass Amherst. As a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa, she created Brown Paper Studio, an applied theatre methodology. She is the author of a memoir For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku.