Review by Jamie Wendt Award-winning writer Amy M. Clark centers the poems in her new stunning collection, Roundabout, on both the turbulence and the joys of motherhood. Roundabout is rooted in the ways that memory and childhood impact the speaker’s desire to save her son from life’s dangers. Divided into four untitled sections, the book roughly moves chronologically, but memory always seeps into the moment that Clark is dissecting, just as it does in real life. Clark begins by highlighting the constant worries a mother feels, ranging from how to soothe a crying baby to the heightened risks of…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Sandra Anfang Gail Newman’s new poetry collection, Blood Memory, is an emotionally challenging and essential reading experience. It chronicles the ongoing effects of the Holocaust on the author and her family across generations. By turns arresting, chilling, tender, simple, and heartbreaking, the writing is consistently lean and starkly honest. The narrator leads us through her own childhood, young adulthood, and middle age, faithfully carrying the burden and responsibilities of memory. Newman is no stranger to poetry or publication. A long-time poet, she has worked as a California poet-teacher with California Poets in the Schools and as the…
Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth I am reading Leah Naomi Green’s The More Extravagant Feast for the fourth time, as I prepare to enter my fifth month of Covid-induced social distancing. It is especially good to have at this time, as her poems possess a radiance and quiet calm that bear witness to a life lived, in Thoreau’s sense, deliberately—a word with etymological roots in “weighed well,” “balanced,” “carefully consulted,” and most significantly, “freeing, liberating.”1 Green homesteads with her husband and two small daughters outside Lexington, Virginia, and The More Extravagant Feast bears witness throughout to the discipline demanded by…
Guest Editor Keisha-Gaye Anderson is a Jamaican-born poet, writer, visual artist, and media professional based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of Gathering the Waters (Jamii Publishing 2014), Everything Is Necessary (Willow Books 2019), and A Spell for Living, which received the Editors’ Choice recognition for the Numinous Orisons, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and is forthcoming from Agape Editions this fall. She is a past participant of the VONA Voices and Callaloo writing workshops, a former fellow of the North Country Institute for Writers of Color. Keisha has been published widely in a number of literary…
Submissions on Range of Motherhood Do you believe your experience of mothering is underrepresented in publishing? Joline Scott-Roller, guest editor, is seeking submissions for a MER VOX Quarterly folio on the theme of “Range of Motherhood,” fiction/CNF (850 words) and poetry. Esp. looking for work by/about WOC and LGBQT+ communities, but also looking for other underrepresented voices in Motherhood literature. Submissions open until July 31st, please email jscottroller@gmail.com for more details.
Athena Dixon On Writing The Incredible Shrinking Woman The Incredible Shrinking Woman opens with an essay, “A Goddess Makes Platanos,” that takes places in the center of chaos and redemption. In the mind of the woman who experienced it, the disjointing of time is jarring, but in the mind of an editor it sets the stage for all that comes afterwards. It gives readers a view of what they can expect from the narrator, both insecurity and untapped power. Giving up expectations of what the sequence should be allows the book to manifest in its natural form. In some…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Robin’s pretty privileged life comes crashing down after her husband dies, leaving her broke and forced to move back to Four Points, the depressed and decaying town she narrowly escaped by marrying Ray. There were a lot of things Robin left behind in Four Points that she never planned on coming to light, but now, out of money and options, she and her daughter Haley’s only choice is to return to her hometown and old ghosts. In a small town, secrets refuse to stay buried. She didn’t want to explain to Haley that the world…
Review by Michelle Wilbert In this debut chapbook of poems by Whitney Rio-Ross—a writer and English teacher living in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee—one is immediately struck by the juxtaposition of sturdy, straightforward language wrapped around familiar stories of women from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. A clear kinship with the 1997 tour de force of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, the poems transports these women from relative obscurity—from names and stories that purpose only to show how each played into God’s vision for the world from a notably patriarchal point of view—into their own voices and experiences of living the…
Review by Christina Veladota Ellen Stone’s poetry is beautiful and is distressing in its beauty. Winner of the 2013 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest for The Solid Living World, Stone has a prolific publishing history in literary journals and has been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Accolades aside, the power of Stone’s work is evident in her stunning imagery. In her new poetry collection, What Is in the Blood, the musicality of her lines evokes the strong emotional tether that keeps the speaker rooted in her childhood, even as she speaks…
Review by Laura Dennis “Telling the right story at the right time is one way to open the door for everyone,” writes Artress Bethany White in “Hard-Headed Ike: A Paean to Black Boyhood” (148), the eleventh of thirteen essays included in Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity. Talk about the right time to find a story… My copy arrived two months after Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed, three weeks after the first arrests for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, four days after the world watched George Floyd’s murder on video; in other words, right when…