Review by Christy Lee Barnes Future Tense is a memoir-in-verse spanning three years in poet Kelly Grace Thomas’ life—years in which she and her new husband grapple with the stress of trying to conceive while her mother battles ovarian cancer. These raw, searing poems blend compelling narrative with skillful, lyrical craft to form a stunning collection. Near the opening of the collection, in “Body of Song,” she writes: any woman who wants to bloom mother is sent to dark. She must steep inside a cave, damp with doubt, until she pulls song from her want. Here, Thomas’s mother-in-law is…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Sharon Tracey In tic, tic, tic, poet Heidi Seaborn unwinds and fast forwards a time capsule of poems that freeze and free, set within a swirl of personal, political, and moral questions of our time. Seaborn is also the author of two other books and three chapbooks, and the executive editor of The Adroit Journal. The evocative title sets the mood—tic, tic, tic—an impulse, a pulse, a twitch, a nerve that awakens and stirs emotions and memories. Seaborn’s overarching subject is Time—living in it and through it, and looking back once it’s passed by us. Her poems…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Beginning with a woman’s journey of infertility, and then shifting to her memories of attending Catholic school and becoming fascinated with the lives of the saints, Book of Hours is a story of the myriad ways in which our culture fails women. This novel is especially relevant today since pregnant women are suffering because of draconian laws that prioritize fetuses over women. I read this morning that over 200 women have died because doctors refused to terminate non-viable ectopic pregnancies where the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, often in a fallopian tube. The…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger Martheaus Perkins’ The Grace of Black Mothers is an honest and loving homage to the women who raised him, including his mother who lived a fully American life. Perkins also commemorates victims of state violence in the African-American community and their mothers. There are lots of hermit crab poems—a form which takes on the format of other writings—and there also are family photographs which are presented as poetic lines themselves. With his debut poetry collection, Perkins enters not only the ongoing conversation among poets and pundits, but with his family, his communities, and the…
Review by Melanie McGehee In her poetry collection Material, Ana María Caballero excavates fear, yearning, and frustration from the ordinary material of family life. Children and husbands, bodies and books, household routines and memories bring a strange urgency to her attempts at understanding. The poems build through accumulation, and their connections are sometimes apparent and sometimes require the reader to linger. “I live my life on a single street,” Caballero writes in “Viviparous.” Her son goes to school. She eats a dairy-free lunch. He comes home. The hours crawl toward night. The poem begins with an epigraph from…
Review by Mary Ellen Talley In much of the world, the summer heat of 2026 has been oppressive, pressing down like an ugly metaphor. How can we cope? First, it helps to identify the challenges. Doubly wonderful when a poet such as Judith Skillman takes the lead to explore varied forms of oppression. Her most recent poetry collection, OPPRESSION, gathers history, mythology, Jewish ancestors, family matters, and her own experiences to create moving free verse poems. This Northwest poet sets the scene in section one, “For Darkness.” She creates images of sewing, weaving, and fabric in the poem, “Penelope’s…
Review by Carole Mertz Despite its many comic touches, I found Grace Before the Fall to be a serious book with a serious message. Its provenance is quite interesting: Lipschultz began the novel over forty years ago, but it did not reach the wider public until 2025. Lipschultz had been a student of John Irving, who first read the manuscript in 1982 and who promotes the work in the book’s foreword. Members of her dissertation committee at Ohio University furthered the novel along its way; later revised forms of the work became a one-woman show at New York’s New…
Review by Melissa Kutsche Tara Lynn Masih is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her YA novel, My Real Name is Hanna, won the Florida Book Award for YA literature, and she has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. In her debut historical fiction novel, The Silent Women, Masih gives readers a glimpse of the physical, psychological, and emotional burdens carried by women in World War II, and what happens when those burdens threaten the fragile bonds between friends, family, communities, and lovers. After the Black Sunday dust storms of 1935 push the Holloway family to…
Review by Tessara Dudley Women In Marigold is a book of poems that explore the smallest moments of life with lush imagery and evocative metaphor. This collection is playful and serious by turns, but earnest and real throughout. Each poem both stands alone and links to those around it. Taken together, they reveal the many quiet stories of everyday life. The poems in this collection are arranged into three sections. The first ruminates on locations—physical and metaphorical—and what makes a home. “PERMIT YOURSELF ANGER” points to the limbo of diaspora: “They won’t go back but they want Nepal /…
Review by Rebecca Jane Continental Drift maps humanity’s kinship with a teeming variety of psycho-social natural geology. A “Field Trip” lyric considers “what rays gild a heron’s thoughts?” (10) and “what green itches each new earth in winter’s wake” (11)? These poems reveal the wordless connection between human experience and land, sea, sky, geological time, tectonic touch and glide. Beyond that, these poems witness the human dramas of war, refuge, and rebuilding from the perspective of stone, grass, muddy water, and salty shore. We may know traumas that force people to scatter, drift, and wash up somehow still alive…