Pichchenda Bao MOTHER TONGUE My mother once told me, “When you were born, they kept calling you black. So I named you Diamond.” What I took away was not how precious I am, but how much she wanted to brighten my darkness. She tells me stories in Khmer though, so I could be wrong. Khmer being slippery like memories, kapek kapok. If this is a true story, what else can I remember? Were we standing at the kitchen counter? Me, crushing garlic, clipping the tips of green beans, as I watched her with the old meat cleaver slamming…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Dear Community, We’re excited to be celebrating our 25th year of publication in 2027, with the release of MER – Mom Egg Review Vol. 25. The issue will be jam-packed with poetry, creative prose, fiction, and art from a stellar line-up of contributors! We are offering our community a chance to pre-order the issue at a reduced rate ($18 with free shipping). Plus, a free gift with purchase is offered for #LitMagWeek–a PDF copy of MER 17 (the first issue in which Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach edited poetry). We’re planning some special events for our anniversary and are…
MER #LitMagWeek Special Pre-order MER – Mom Egg Review Vol. 25, our 25th Anniversary Issue, for just $18, includes shipping! This extra-large issue launching in April will retail for $20–order now for a reduced price. ORDER DURING OUR #LITMAGWEEK SPECIAL (9/28 – 10/2) and get a special gift — Receive a Free PDF issue of MER Vol. 17 the first MER issue with poetry edited by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach, including work by Margie Shaheed, Dayna Patterson, Jane Yolen, Sarah Freligh and many more. . Cover art by Megan Wynne.
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley On our Bookshelf this month, books by Elizabeth Metzger, Preeti Parikh, Jo Pitkin, Erin Miller Reid, Linda Scheller, Suzanne Sherman, Avia Tadmor. Jo Pitkin, Village: Recession, Finishing Line Press, August 2026, poetry In Village: Recession, Jo Pitkin explores the Great Recession of the early 2000s from the intimate vantage point of an American village, documenting the effects of this worldwide economic meltdown on friends, family, and neighbors—like the hardworking snow plower or the carpenter who never finishes his own house in order to avoid paying higher property taxes—and on the poet herself. When…
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…
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…