Cheryl Clark Vermeulen The Suckling Leading Lady Let’s say Homer is a woman (Shakespeare for that matter) and an eye is burned through on a figurehead swollen with water. Splitting across an arm or a leg, desire has fallen or is false or passionately kissing the woman goodbye. Adrift, at night, the streetlamps pearl. I’m here and I’m nothing but miles and gusts of music and skin putting on something a bit more commodious. My face is a plaything pale and fatty. I do not rattle. Last night, every night, I feed the babies white neurology. My sights have…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Megan Leonard POEM WRITTEN WHILE I WAIT IN THE COLD ROOM AFTER THE NURSES HAVE GONE OUT BUT BEFORE THE DOCTOR COMES IN Megan Leonard’s poetry can be found most recently in Sharkpack Annual, Transom, and Reservoir. Her digital chapbook, where the body ends, is available through Platypus Press. Meg lives and works on New Hampshire’s seacoast.
Rebecca Hart Olander Dysmorphia I’ve been a Super-8 movie camera in a pond trying to film my confidence, a wife, and a conversation full of silences. My job was to make things up. I have proof. Home: butter, salt, mirrors, a corset. Four different kinds of heartbreaking. I know where everything is: children, dust mites, poetry projects. A rusted-out childhood, small, changed and never recovered. Wild strawberries. Little buckskin jacket. Book of cats. My dad, favorite cowboy, scared of dying. A struggle to read this enemy climbing under the same roof. The annexed answer: we love too much to choose.…
Jules Jacob Broken Sonnet for Relapsing Daughters this song was yours clean without loss or metaphors yet comfort’s counterpart is pain is what I can’t spare us, is what quits speaking and walking, sinking to the carpet keening night of its stars. To pain is the trembling cat running to not away, sacrificing mirror neurons to dispel my dis-ease when you try to leave this startled earth. The dark waits still cells search black holes before they were known. If found we return rearranged. Don’t say nebulae can’t reappear. Please. No more lectures…
Marjorie Maddox Regret I was so tired of stepping in it until it rose to my ankles, my calves, clinging to my shins like tar as I tugged my unshaven limbs this way and that, so, so tired of it, my flecks of almost-fur coming off in the thick grasp of it, so tired until it rose to my knees, then thighs, gulping in all things varicose and cellulite, so, so, so, so until it belched itself higher to my waist, my breasts, my shoulders, shook with the shimmying of my spasmic attempt to breathe the teaspoon of desire…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg There is a considerable and influential archive of women’s writing detailing with journeys of terminal illness, as evidenced in the raw and honest work of poets Audre Lorde, Carol Snyder Halberstadt, and Kate Fox, whose experience with breast cancer resulted in a four-book sequence beginning with My Pink Ribbons. It is an admirable and brave pursuit to creatively convey the shock, pain, and day-to-day struggle of living against the idea of dying, while immersing themselves in domestic routine and finding gifts in moments of familiar peace or simple accomplishment. The Body at a Loss chronicles…
Review by MaryAnn L. Miller Pramila Venkateswaran, in addition to The Singer of Alleppey, has had six other books of poetry published and has won many awards. Raised in Bombay, Venkateswaran lives in New York and teaches English and Women’s Studies. She is a Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, NY. She directs Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival. Venkateswaran who never knew her grandmother Sitala, memorializes her as The Singer of Alleppey, who lived in southern India. Venkateswaran creates the persona of her grandmother, thus, also becoming the singer. Her story is divided into parts of a day, beginning appropriately…
Review by Kelly Bargabos When I travel through neighborhoods at night, I become a voyeur, desperate to see into other homes through the big picture window with the curtains left open, lit up from the inside. I suppose that is why I like the genre of memoir. In the few seconds I have as I pass by, I try to capture as much as possible. Is the TV on? Who lives inside those four walls? How old are they? What do they do? Does love, or fear, roam the living room? What I don’t see with my eyes, I…
Review by Christine E. Salvatore Feminine Rising is a testament to the power of story, how telling a story can be as powerful and healing as hearing one with which we identify. The essays and poems within got me thinking about my childhood. Growing up, my sisters were four years older and twins who never did anything individually, so on weekends Mom would take them on her errands and whatnot, and Dad would take me. It was a good divide and conquer arrangement for parents, and I was more suited for my quiet dad’s activities anyway, happy to read…
Review by Julia Lisella This ninth collection of poetry by Andrea Potos begins, appropriately, with breakfast, perhaps the most mundane meal of the day, but also the most celebratory for its steady rituals. So, too, the poet’s relationship to the death of her mother. The book explores a grief that is at once deep and at times overwhelming, and also joyful in its power to resuscitate presence of the person who is dead. In the first poem of the book, “Breakfast Eternal” Potos sets the mood for the entire collection as the speaker imagines having coffee with her…