Review by Tessara Dudley Before I know the names of every tree and birdsong along the saltmarsh, I will hold my daughter. And I will finally understand that it is possible to be both the doe standing in the clearing and the fawn leaping through the meadow, scared, and on her own. “Leap” (3) In her poetry collection, Everything Is Water, Chelsea Krieg develops two major streams of experience: on the one hand, giving birth to a child and being a parent; on the other hand, the strain of caring for a partner battling cancer, and the potential loss…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Rebecca Jane The Presence of One Word reawakens a reader’s senses, inviting quiet charms to bloom with meaning. This collection shares deep inner peace that the poet has discovered on her journeys—to a grandmother’s house in Greece, a coffee shop in Vienna, the moor’s resonating with the spirits of the Brontë sisters, and beyond. Andrea Potos is a masterful observer. Her eyes notice a place where the heart of autumn finds rhythm, and she encourages observations to express astonishment, gladness, longing, or love. Her expression has the power to alert us to the poetics of a spider…
Kathy Nelson BEFORE I DIE Some great uncle passed it down, that curio, that heirloom, that tour de force— seamless wooden links lifted from the branch, whole, already interlocking, as if by magic, with nothing but a pocketknife. Let me be that whittled willow chain I lost. Let me be that blue bird I gave away, the one with white-tipped wings my mother kept all her life—ceramic, not a chip or scratch. Let me be the last letter from my father, loping, looping letters across a lined legal pad. Your mother and I miss you, we’re so glad you’ll…
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…
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…