Review by Katy E. Ellis Joanna Streetly is a prize-winning Canadian poet and non-fiction writer who emigrated from Trinidad and has lived on the unceded territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht on Vancouver Island for the past thirty years. The poems in All of Us Hidden sweep the reader into Streetly’s past as a young stepmother new to Canada and whose two stepsons disappear (presumably drowned) when they are adults. Streetly’s collection grapples with this loss as well as the loss of her mother, the birth of her own daughter, and the dire relationship humans have with Mother Earth. Every poem…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Shasta Grant on When We Were Feral Interviewed by Tyler Wetherall Shasta Grant’s haunting debut novel is a coming-of-age story that doesn’t shy away from the brutalities of girlhood. Set in 1990s rural New Hampshire, it follows 13-year-old Maggie over two summers following her mother’s abandonment. She initially finds refuge in her best friend Sarah’s church-going family, until another classmate’s mother goes missing, and the girls are drawn together in a complex bond. A chance encounter with a group of older boys in the woods sets the three girls on a dangerous new path, as they discover the power…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Pooja Ugrani, My Home is Dissent, Poetrywala, February 2026, poetry My Home is Dissent is a luminous poetry collection that moves fluidly between the everyday and the elemental, where the domestic becomes a site of quiet resistance and reimagining. Ugrani’s dissent hums through acts of nurture and refusal, through the courage to remain soft in a world that demands armour. Her poems measure the dimensions of love, labour, and loss through the delicate instruments of memory, architecture, and motherhood. Formally supple and sensorial, cerebral and sensuous, her work folds the architectural and the emotional…
Review by Tessara Dudley Singing from the Deep End is a powerful book of poetry about motherhood and life cycles. It is divided into three sections, each focused on the author’s relationships with the four people to whom the book is dedicated: her mother, a dear friend who passed on in 2020, and Hart Olander’s two children. In the first section, the poems reflect on the love, resentment, confusion, and yearning a daughter can feel for a mother, especially a single mother. “Our mother lived as she wanted her life to be. Did that teach me // to be…
MER has opened submissions for its 25th annual issue, MER 27. Submissions of poetry, fiction, creative prose, and art will be accepted from May 1 to July 15th. All submissions are taken through Submittable. Please view our Guidelines and Submission info.
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason Sometimes it takes near-death experiences for people to really start living. In Sharon White’s latest novel, Minato Sketches, Gigi, the protagonist, suffers a stroke and leaves her husband and grown sons behind when she moves to Tokyo to teach for a summer. Minato is the area in Tokyo where Gigi lives and the sketches in the title refer to both Gigi’s profession as an art historian as well as the very short chapters that comprise this novel. White is a professor emerita from Temple University and an award-winning author of several genres. She won an…
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor IBEJI A Fibonacci Poem The day after his birth she traced the blue hill ridge of his ear whispered Ibeji Light spilled in the streets of his grandfather’s ancestral home twin boy talking to trees. (In the Nigerian pantheon of Gods, Ibeji is named for a twin birth.) Cheryl Boyce-Taylor: Winner of the 2022 Audre Lorde award for Lesbian Poetry; We Are Not Wearing Helmets, nominated for the 2023 Hurston Wright Legacy Award; and The Limitless Heart, Winner of the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award. Cheryl currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is working on her eight…
MER Launch Readings Are Online Now! Watch both readings on our MER YouTube Channel. MER Launch I Featured readers: a. adenike Phillips, Amanda Brush, Amy Asherah, Brandel France de Bravo, Brittany N. Jaekel, Carlin Katz, Chloe Yelena Miller, Connie Post, Erin Murphy, H.E. Fisher, Heidi Seaborn, Jean Monahan, Jeanne-Marie Fleming, Jen Karetnick, Jennifer Franklin, Judy Ireland, Lynn Pedersen, Martha Pitts, Megan Peak, Merna Dyer Skinner, Michelle D. Parrish, Onna Solomon, Pichchenda Bao, Rachel Becker, Ruth Hoberman, Suzanne Edison. WATCH NOW MER Launch II Featured readers: Abigail Wender, Amy Barnes, Dayna Patterson, Iquo DianaAbasi, Jennifer Jean, Jo Ann Clark, Jules…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Maria Lisella, At the Hour of Now, Bordighera Press, April 2026, poetry Maria Lisella’s newest collection At the Hour of Now tells the unflinchingly honest story of a blended family that raises urgent questions, quells hearts, and provides a gateway to healing from loss, bolstered by genuinely rare moments. At the center of the collection is her stepson, the character who sparked the narrative. Rich with dialogue, part love letter in three voices, At the Hour of Now untangles the threads of storytelling, mental illness, grief, and caregiving. The randomness of fate, and the…
Review by A. Anupama In this collection, Catherine Esposito Prescott’s poems trace the loss of her teenage son Austen to a rare, pediatric brain cancer. I read this collection in the time between Mother’s Day and my daughter’s high school graduation—already an emotional time, and that’s how it is with poetry books. They often seem to land with synchronicity on a reader, and to grow roots when finding resonance. The sharpness of Prescott’s descriptions of her experience of her son’s illness struck me even more keenly than if I had been in a different part of my life. Her…