Poet Duet: A Mother and Daughter Poetry Manuscript Review by Mindy Kronenberg In a previous review of Carolyn Clark’s New Found Land, I stated that the collection read as “…an epic of life’s discoveries and detours, the shared excursions of a fully aware woman.” How lovely to be invited, once again, into the poet’s realm of profound moments, this time accompanied by her mother’s own perspective and distinctive voice. Poet Duet begins with a cluster of Clark’s mother’s poems, and then includes her own, intertwining and alternating according to shared mood or theme. It makes for a compelling and…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Julia Lisella Some Glad Morning is Barbara Crooker’s ninth collection of poems. Since her debut collection, Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award, Crooker’s work has insisted on the lyrical promise of the everyday and the domestic to renew our spirits. At the same time, her work often gently raises the stakes of those concerns. That’s most true in this aptly named new collection that recalls the old gospel song, “Some glad morning / I’ll fly away.” But in the meantime, the poet is very much here with us, contending with all that makes…
Review by Christine Salvatore Reading a poem from Katherine Nuernberger’s new collection is like listening to a friend tell a fascinating story, taking few breaths while she lets one inevitable detail bleed into the next; to hang on, lean in, listen closely, until your own breath is finally taken away by the startling resolution. In the first poem Nuernberger takes us from the photography of Diane Arbus to an incident where her neighbor fell but was unharmed to Plato to Sontag and back to the neighbor. We are never lost because, of course, it makes perfect sense. As Nuernberger…
Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir by Sharon Dolin Review by Kelly Bargabos Reading Sharon Dolin’s memoir, Hitchcock Blonde, is like sitting in a theater next to the author as she watches a movie reel of her own life, and uses Alfred Hitchcock films to make sense of her memories. The author herself tells us she finds it easier to remember things by not thinking about them directly, and therefore the Hitchcock movies help her process the scenes that span her life including the complicated relationships, thoughts, and feelings carried within the episodes that she shares. Each chapter is anchored…
Review by Carla Panciera By the time Kerrin McCadden’s brother dies of an overdose, she has already rehearsed his death: “There he goes again,” she writes in Keep This to Yourself, a searing collection that examines both the profound individual grief of losing a loved one and the collective tragedy of the opioid epidemic. These sixteen poems rely on the juxtapositions of the “monster” that is addiction and the complexity that is the love between siblings. In the opening poem, “When My Brother Dies”, McCadden writes: In the john boat, my brother and I float and row. +++Water weeds…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Connie Post’s Prime Meridian, I lost count of how many times she used the words “falling” and “broken.” In the poet’s world everything is tenuous. Everything is breaking or about to break, is falling, or about to fall. Motherhood and childhood, two fragile experiences indelibly linked, can be forced into invisibility by a father’s abuse. And yet, the poet stands ready to recognize that “Sometimes a mother is a prayer/an altar upon which your knees break” (26). Post is adept at pulling an imperceptible thread through each poem in the book as if…
Review by Sherre Vernon Megan Merchant is an editor at Pirene’s Fountain and The Comstock Review and holds an MFA from UNLV and is the author Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2017), Grief Flowers (2018) and Before the Fevered Snow (2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Award, the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. Before the Fevered Snow is Megan Merchant’s elegy to the unravelling and eventual loss of a very influential mother. From the early poem “Nesting,” to the whispered 4-line “Elegy” that marks the collection’s final page, Merchant’s…
Review by Laura Dennis In the era of COVID-19, parents find themselves confronting new ways of inhabiting the role of a parent-and. Parent and teacher. Parent and work-from-home employee. Parent and front-line worker. Parent with coronavirus, cut off from those she loves. More than ever, we writers ask, as does Niku Kashef in chapter 8 of Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, Maternity, “How does a person who is never off the clock balance art and life?” (155). Though written in pre-pandemic times, Rachel Epp Buller’s and Charles Reeve’s co-edited anthology often rings true as it explores what it means to…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson When I asked to review this collection, I’ll admit, I’d forgotten exactly what the phrase, “let X equal something” meant, but I knew it was math. I’ve heard of math-based poetry – could this be it? I’ve heard math inclined friends say that proofs were like poetry – again, is the book to finally make that connection for me? A good friend wrote a verse novel for middle schoolers that used coding to structure her poems. Much to my surprise – and excitement, Let X = X is none of these things. Cleveland Wall’s collection…
Review by Michelle Wilbert A number of years ago, I read a book by noted Quaker author Parker Palmer entitled Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. In it, the following seminal quote: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” As I was reading this intelligently probing book of poetry, Asking the Form…