Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me, McClelland & Stewart, March 2026, poetry In these searching, spare, and resonant poems, Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail, reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Momma May Be Mad is unlike any memoir I’ve previously read or reviewed. The opening of the memoir pulls the reader into the nonlinear hellscape of the author as she simultaneously battles anorexia, alcoholism, and bipolar disorder. By outward appearance, Kerry Neville looked successful: an attractive woman with a Ph.D. but her anorexia, addiction, and multiple attempts to end her life derailed her for many years. The suicide attempts led to multiple hospitalizations where she was treated with ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and antipsychotic medication. The ECT created gaps in her memory, and those gaps…
Folio Editors Cindy Veach and Anna V.Q. Ross To mother is to live with the constant oscillation between noise (kids, advice, to dos, societal expectations) and silence (naptime, playdates, custody arrangements, estrangement, empty nest). The poems in this folio explore this dichotomy through a soundscape of bees, a whistling kettle, chorus of robins, white static, a children’s chorus, yawping coyotes, the startling jangle of a lock, and the squeal of a rabbit. Meanwhile, silence becomes both refuge and erasure: a closed door, a silent stone, the ghost of a lost constellation, the taste of ginger, a wall of gray…
Rachel Beachy All the Small Things “It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing.” – Jack Gilbert In the long night, the night spent longing for rest – when rest is a thing that must be bargained for, prayed over, in these times when goodness comes as a surprise – I am so tired of being surprised by goodness, by the ways we are all the same. Didn’t I used to kneel in the dirt and save the small stones? The earth- worms in the driveway after a rainstorm? The line…
Jessica Bozek Lost Constellation: Noctua Without drugs I lack the imagination it takes to look up and see an animal in a scattering of stars. Rotate the shapes and a different bird emerges: solitaire, thrush, mockingbird, owl. Pictures overlapped as astronomers competed to colonize the southern sky. One autumn evening in 1822, Hydra’s tail became a perch and Noctua appeared. Words crowd the starlines as the child crowds the mother. I need a bowl / I need a sky. I can’t wash the cherries myself, she complains. Someone always gets the last word. The owl now a ghost…
Anna Crandall To: E Dear, Out of the black dark of: coyotes yawping their humanoid songs to the shine of the paved-bright street-light city, your cries, too, barren animal greed. My thistle-thorn, my kismet, my moon-crescent fingernail hanging suspended in my womb, I need. Write you letters on the day you were born. Think like words can take this torn thing and mend. Leaves falling into a rush of water, fever-dream, time-lapse scream: I keep little pain. Just your first animal yelp and the way we were strung together, wet laundry, flapping, pinned to each other, sodden, the…
Alexis David A Topography of Motherhood The fog lays over the hollow hills and I am here dreaming. I pair the sound of death with the taste of ginger. The moment of birth with the memory of bones. Before I take my tea, the rain comes. The streets are full of lanterns. The fog lifts and I fold my legs beneath me. I wipe your chin with a cotton cloth. Alexis David is a book critic, poet and fiction writer who holds an MFA from New England College. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook The Names of…
Andrea Deeken Silent Treatment White static on the television, a wave rising at my back. A wall of grey clouds skimming towards my car. I am driving away from you. Since we last spoke, Spring has come. The birds are busy making their nests. The geese are on their way back—see how they fly in such haphazard Vs—change course sometimes, the way I change lanes when late to work. My favorite flowers grow in ravines: purple hyacinths, yellow dandelions locked in the fists of my only child who collects them in jars for our kitchen table. Still, I look…
Carol Dorf Ignore Them: Memorial Day Bees swarmed by our front door – I ignored them – the way I had been taught I guided my child to do the same – Ignore them my mother would say Meaning bees – meaning wasps – meaning boys and their calls A few hours later the bees found all the holes in our old brick chimney For weeks a beekeeper visited to capture the swarm – The new queen ignored an attractive box ten feet away Little gates prevented worker bees from re-entering after they left to forage – Later…
Caitlin Gildrien The Stone Sits Down to Dinner It is loud with children debating the most powerful Pokémon and the stone is grateful she doesn’t have ears. One child does not like her lasagna, though last week this child had seconds and asked the stone if they could have lasagna again. The other child does not like the bread with the stuff on it, and the stone would like to scream that she didn’t put garlic on that slice, she set it aside purposely, just try it for god’s sake, but the stone doesn’t have a voice. The…