M.M. DeVoe Lemon Chicken Rice Soup for the Soul I never expected the pandemic to result in good things for our family, but it did. My daughter was thirteen when the pandemic hit, a young thirteen, still mourning the fairy-wings and tiaras she had pitched in a fit of middle-school transition the summer before. As store shelves emptied and the world closed in, she and I were quarantined in a loft apartment in Manhattan, searching for a new normal. My job as her mother, I thought, was to keep things positive. I had been moved by “Life is Beautiful”…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Nadia Wynter In Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, an island woman from Trinidad, a mother, wife, friend, poet, an artist, gives the world a peek inside her grieving heart after the death of her beloved son, Malik Izaak Boyce Taylor, known globally as Phife Dawg, the underrated soul of the acclaimed hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. As she mourns her public-figure son, mom’s world crumbles into a sea of vivid memories, a sea of infinite tears and a sea of sad faces around the world saying, in an attempt to console the inconsolable, “Sorry for your…
Reviewed by Suzanne Edison Jessica Gigot is a farmer, poet, teacher, and musician. She is the author of Flood Patterns, (Antrim House Books, 2015), and her writing appears in such publications as Orion, Taproot and Poetry Northwest. She teaches poetry workshops and eco-poetics through Richard Hugo House in Seattle, WA and on her farm, Harmony Fields, in Bow, WA. Additionally, she writes about food, sustainable farming practices, and is featured in a TedX Talk, The Poetics of Food, 2017. I met Jessica as a fellow student in a poetry workshop during this pandemic year, via Zoom. Though we live…
Reviewed by Emily Webber Tara Isabel Zambrano’s short story collection Death, Desire, and Other Destinations delivers on what it promises in the title. Zambrano highlights our desire for human connection and our yearning for the things we cannot have or have lost. So much of 2020 has asked us to endure the opposite of desire. We’ve been asked to forego simple pleasures like eating a meal with a friend to grand celebrations for weddings and births. We’ve been asked to shrink down our worlds and to contain our longing for human connection. But Zambrano’s stories take us to a…
Pandemic Parenting: An MER VOX folio Curated by J.L. Scott Parenting is always a challenge, even in the best of circumstances. Parenting during a pandemic, when fears for safety are high and opportunities for distraction and activity are limited, is especially challenging. Sometimes, though, the challenges we face end up shedding light on some aspect of ourselves, our lives, our children and yes, even our parenting, that ends making things better. The following works come from mothers covering the gamut of challenges, from the heart wrenching to the heart warming, during this time of Pandemic Parenting. Featured: Jane Yolen Susan McGee…
Review by Cammy Thomas Patrice Boyer Claeys grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Manchester, U.K. Her first book of poems, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering was followed a year later by The Machinery of Grace in 2020, both from Kelsay Books. She has been nominated twice for Best of the Net. This is a gorgeous book, made entirely of lines taken from other poems, but absolutely clear in its unified voice. I can’t see how she did it! The book is in three sections, the first about the death of the speaker’s mother, the second a…
Inside Out: Poems on Writing And Reading Poems by Marjorie Maddox Review by Tasslyn Magnusson How’s your COVID-19 writing going? Mine has been less than productive. Between Zoom meetings, elections, navigating online therapy and kid stuff, my mind feels as if its in a hundred places all at the same time. And those moments of silence I had reserved for my poems, well I have no idea where they went. Inside Out: Poems on Writing And Reading Poems by Marjorie Maddox came at the perfect time for my practice. While it is geared for younger readers, nobody ever should miss an…
MER VOX Quarterly – Fall 2020 Welcome to MER VOX, Fall Edition! Range of Motherhood is a literary folio curated by J.L. Scott amplifying diverse mother’s voices. We have a Labor Day poem by Margo Berdeshevsky, Rage Hezekiah’s inspiring essay and poems influenced by the writings of Sandra Cisneros, part of our new Legacy series curated by Ana C.H. Silva. M.A.M.A., our ongoing collaboration with Museum of Motherhood and ProCreate Project, features poems by Margie Shaheed and art by Maria Linares investigating injustice and prejudice. We hope you enjoy the issue. We wish you health, safety, and peace, and urge…
Range of Motherhood An MER VOX folio curated by J.L. Scott The experience of motherhood is so wide and varied that there is no way that a single volume of anything could hope to represent it all. The works in this folio, though, help to shine a light on those voices that are sometimes left out of the conversation. Hopefully they help to better expose the beautifully wide range of motherhood. ~J.L. Scott Featured writers: Naomi J. Williams Sophie Rhem Pooja Ugrani Meghan Trask Smith Onita Morgan Edwards Eloísa Pérez-Lozano Janet Garber Jennifer L. Freed Nicole Hospital-Medina …
Naomi J. Williams No Doors When they had been stuck indoors for a very long time, the children asked if they could play outside, just for a little while, and the mother relented because she wanted to be alone for a few minutes of her life. But the children hollered, Mama, we have no doors to get out! And the mother, who’d just laid herself down on the sofa, sat right up and said, That’s true! We forgot to put in the doors! And it was also true, she thought, what they said about “out of the mouths of babes.”…