Poetry by Keisha-Gaye Anderson from Everything is Necessary Everything is Necessary every thing is necessary, required to be is just is how you see is up to you are you pink and green caladium, a field of hearts in bloom, bowing beneath the rust/gold gown of a redwood tree? or are you misery? a spirit cemented to the stone walls of its temple, crumbling and crashing onto every mirror that enters forgetting that all you are is We, a thousand-petal flower rocking in the breeze called time the symphony of lives is merely one second one breath to the great…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Author’s Note – Sarah Cannon On Writing The Shame of Losing I wrote the memoir The Shame of Losing while I was falling out of love with my spouse. I fell out of love with him for many reasons – not simply because of the brain trauma that changed him. I wish it were that easy. It’s more like the shame of facing an on-going trauma – a terrible accident, rehab, work and financial struggles – changed me and I couldn’t go back to being who I thought I was. My world view exploded. It felt like a fall from…
Review by Lisa Hase-Jackson Sweet World by Maureen Seaton illustrates the absurd and often contradictory aspects of mortality through irreverent humor and wry observation. Her poems speak frankly of the physical manifestation of disease and considers closely the many mixed messages our culture delivers concerning the pursuit of happiness and causes of cancer. “Given that mortality was sudden and focused and within walking distance,” Seaton writes in “Fore/words 2017,” I tried constantly to make light for however long the journey” (xiii). It is with this attention to “light” that Seaton remains resilient in her struggle and risible in her verse.…
Review by Emily Webber “It starts with a face in a binder, CHILDREN AVAILABLE, reads the cover” (1). This is the first sentence of The Risk of Us, Rachel Howard’s remarkable debut novel. In the novel’s opening scene, the unnamed narrator and her husband, Sebastian, are looking through binders to select the child they will foster and hopefully adopt. When they come across pictures of older kids, they discuss how hard it will be for them to find a home, deemed too unlikely to form a bond with their new parents. Beyond hope, they seem to say. The opening scene…
Review by Tina Kelley I always felt, after reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, that the sweet little book we’d used as a bible while gestating had left us all completely underprepared for parenthood. Now that I’ve gotten two teenagers through a total of 33 person years without too much lasting damage, I see that the book didn’t remotely warn us of what really awaited us. Sure there would be flatulence, and increased teariness, and let us not forget the discourse on the mucus plug, which might cause any single lady to consider better methods of birth control. We…
Lara Lillibridge On Writing Mama, Mama, Only Mama Lara Lillibridge on her memoir, Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent—from Divorce and Dating to Cooking and Crafting, All While Raising the Kids and Maintaining Your Own Sanity (Sort Of). (Skyhorse, May 2019) Being a single mother means relaxing your cleanliness standards. A lot. Being a single mother means missing your kids like crazy when your ex has them, only to want to give them back ten minutes after they come home. Being a single mother means accepting sleep deprivation as a…
Squeaky Wheels: Travels with my Daughter by Train, Plane, Metro, Tuk-tuk and Wheelchair by Suzanne Kamata Review by Lara Lillibridge Suzanne Kamata grew up in Grand Haven, Michigan. She went to Japan to teach English, fell in love, and married a Japanese man. She gave birth to micro-preemie twins, one of whom was deaf and had cerebral palsy. Kamata recounts her struggles in learning to support and advocate for her daughter, while fostering independence at the same time. She writes about her first overseas travels to the US, and local trips around Japan. Kamata received a grant to…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen A definitive theme in Margo Taft Stever’s new volume of poetry, Cracked Piano, is the mercurial role of mothers. That motherhood is both a terrifying and transcendent time in many women’s lives is not lost on Stever. Over and over, the poet sketches images of women who don’t just model binary traits of good and bad but who are fully realized human beings. Children and infants inhabit the poems as well and motherhood is filled with the vestiges of childhood from eating animal crackers to feeding puppies. These are unfailingly light images embedded in…
Review by Carole Mertz Maggie Nelson centered her Bluets around its “blue” theme and Inger Christensen around the alphabet. In her book Pansies, Carol Barrett shaped her vignettes around the personality and culture of an Apostolic Lutheran babysitter. Teenage babysitter Abigail is hired to care for the author’s child Sarah. This collection conveys a profile of the babysitter and of how her character influenced the author’s family. For the writing of Pansies, Barrett, a clinical psychologist, received the support of two grants, one a GAP grant from the State of Washington, the other from Union Institute & University. As a…
Review by Lara Lillibridge “One word. One breathless syllable, as steady, as fragile, as a hinge. Try to say it softly. If… The sound lingers, the weight of the word hovers.” (75) Deborah Batterman’s novel, just like february, is filled with lyrical prose in this coming of age story. As the story begins, we join Rachel in watching the dynamics between her Vietnam veteran father and anti-war mother as they prepare to finally wed. Her grandmother—the family matriarch—adds her own drama to the occasion, and we meet the rest of the quirky siblings. Rachel is often relegated to the role…