Sati Mookherjee MY DAUGHTER THE TREE My daughter was born the year she turned fourteen, the year I was born, her spine rose curving into the tissue of sky, she spurned true for lordotic, posture for pose. I told myself: What doesn’t bend, breaks. She lived right by the gaping well. Was born the year of the tree – I used to rake the fat fallen leaves, praying. I’ve shorn shoots, pulled off wire-sharp vines, scratched its bark as tenderly as if she were mine. Because she was mine, I mean. Combed the thatch of her hair, washed…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lara Lillibridge Skip It, Spice Girls, vanilla body spray, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and frosted eyeshadow. “We’ve grown up when being captured on-screen is still a novelty.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery captures all of the desperation, longing, and joy of a 1990’s girlhood in this slim but powerful chapbook, where girls “…learn hesitation more than certainty.” A time when sexism and sexual assault were routine, Montgomery grows up on the page, graduating from high school teachers who sleep with students to college professors who do the same, learning and rebelling against a culture that tells girls how to…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason Jamie Wendt is an award-winning poet, a prolific book reviewer, and a middle school teacher based in Chicago. Her latest collection of poetry, Laughing in Yiddish, was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and a semifinalist for the 2023 Word Works Washington Prize, the 2022 Longleaf Press Book Contest, and the 2022 Brick Road Poetry Press Book Contest. Several themes run through Wendt’s new book. Immigration is a big one and it’s chilling to think that Wendt wrote these poems several years before the latest immigration and refugee crises, not just…
Review by Kate Lewis With Body, Nina B. Lichtenstein Explores the Physical Contours of Self Navigating through explorations of a body allow author Nina B. Lichtenstein’s memoir, Body: My Life In Parts, to bring together the entirety of her life as she lived it: viscerally, with teeth, and belly, and breasts, and back – as well as how the breakdown of those parts can often bring us to our literal knees. The book traces her life and uncovers the deeper meaning that some of these parts of her brought to the whole. An incident with a bit of…
An Interview with Jocelyn Jane Cox, Author of Motion Dazzle, a Memoir of Motherhood, Loss and Skating on Thin Ice. Interview by Sara Weiss In her debut memoir Motion Dazzle, former competitive figure skater and coach Jocelyn Jane Cox reflects on the deep bond between herself and her mother. She explores a childhood defined by the rigorous demands of training on the ice along with years of sporadic pain and injury, and the sacrifices her mother made to support this pursuit. The book also speaks to “the sandwich generation,” as she recounts the paradox of becoming a new mother…
MER Bookshelf – August 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Suzanne Kamata, River of Dolls and Other Stories, Penguin Random House SEA, January 2025, literary fiction (short stories) These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales and lore, explore the lives of individuals caught between desire and duty, as well as the conflicting expectations of different cultures. For example, in “Day Pass,” a college student in South Carolina befriends a female prisoner on a work release program, thinking that she will be a good influence, but then realizes that she has gotten in over her head.…
Review by Rebecca Jane Mothersalt shines a light on moments of awe, ambivalence, disorientation, surprise, and power that arise with pregnancy, labor, childbirth, breastfeeding, and caring for babies. These poems reveal a woman aligning her Mother identity with that of the Writer, the Japanese American, the Friend, the Patient, the Lover of language, and the Guardian of memories. These poems reveal the mind as a source of keen attentiveness that wrests the telling details and underscores life’s complicated plexus of pain and joy. “Labor is a temple with many faces” (25). Along the way, we pause to hear the…
Review by Geri Lipschultz Emotionally and thematically resonant, Barbara Henning’s thirteenth book is a slim volume of sixty-nine entries, quasi-biographical and quasi-epistolary in nature. Even the title reflects a quality of compression and intimacy that characterizes these entries: “Girlfriend,” without the “s,” honors a feeling of one-ness that emerges, despite the number of seemingly disparate stories, each not even a full page, but poignant and startling, not to mention deftly crafted in a manner that does not call attention to the writing itself. Henning began this project in the nineties but had to put it off for the…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron In “A Safe Haven for Writers,” the fifth story in Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut collection, This Isn’t Fun Anymore, the narrator enrolls in a writing retreat. While there, she intends to show her husband that she’s capable of meeting her own needs, and work on “a collection of domestic horror stories. Stories of what’s just beneath the surface” (71). Before reading Micka-Foos’s book, the “domestic horror” genre was not on my radar. But as soon as I saw that phrase, I realized I’d just finished four stories falling squarely within its contours. This Isn’t Fun Anymore…
Monster Galaxy by Cindy Veach Review by Ruth Hoberman On the cover of Monster Galaxy, Cindy Veach’s new book of poems, Athena glows in gold armor, having sprung powerful and fully formed from her father Zeus’s forehead. The poems in Monster Galaxy are similarly powerful, fully formed, and haunted by the elusive father whose tastes and demands shaped the poet’s childhood. Paranoid, overprotective, at times sexist—he’s a flawed husband and father but loved, and his death leaves the speaker stunned by his absence. “I don’t know how it happens that a big man,/a man so present,/lies down and…