Review by Jennifer Martelli I’ve come to love the epistolary form, which is defined as literary work that reads as a letter or letters. Relationships are laid out on a surgeon’s table, emotions revealed through the mechanisms of the letter. We are allowed into the body of the letter through the salutation: why this is being written and to whom, how the sender ends the epistle. This ancient form has been passed down and used as a literary tool, from Emily Dickinson to Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters. Two horror gothic novels stand out as examples of…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Jane Ward In Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, award-winning short story writer and poet Carla Panciera presents a deeply moving collection of nineteen standalone stories that, read as a whole, pay tribute to the years she spent with her father, Aldo, working his family’s dairy farm in Westerly, Rhode Island. These tales of the farm and its historied beginnings from three Holsteins and a legendary bull named Osborndale Ivanhoe feel intimate, almost conversational. As Panciera writes in the introduction to the collection: For three decades, I returned to a place that exists only in memory. As…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Andrea Deeken’s debut chapbook, Mother Kingdom, is an elegantly presented collection of poems that echoes other refined voices—Peacock, Olds, and Kooser—with its attention to striking imagery and startling realizations rising from both quiet moments and rites of passage. It’s one of those books that I fill with pencil-scratch as I move through the pages, so moved by (and eager to highlight) the poetic poignancy of phrases that lift off the page as one reads them. This is a journey of discovery and reconciling, through childhood to motherhood, mortality and legacy, and how each stage of…
Review by Michelle Panik Splashed on the cover of Everything’s Changing is a woman in glamorous sunglasses and a headwrap à la Jackie O, her figure a 3-D image edged with bright colors. And, indeed, the people within Chelsea Stickle’s flash fiction are photorealistic. Firmly entrenched in magical realism that bends both whimsical and darkly cautionary, place figures largely into the stories. Many are set in close communities—in one, a neighborhood is overrun by vandalizing peacocks; in another, people shoot cardinals in the desperate hope that they will bring good fortune. And while Stickle’s landscapes are richly imaginative, it’s…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Dragonfly Morning, consisting of twenty poems, heavily illustrated over its fifty one pages by both Eihmane and Bridget Irving, put out by Being Books, is a wonderful follow up to Eihmane’s recent chapbook, One Day at the Taiwan Land Museum. Eihmane, a transplant to Taiwan from her native Latvia, pulls in the big-lunged breaths of someone in a new land who finds more of herself as she integrates the beauty, objects, and sensibilities of a place into her way of being. The way a new context energizes, sharpens, and informs the senses is especially…
MER 21 is launching in April! Stay tuned for cover reveal, launch dates, readings and more!
Poetry Prompts by Anne Graue Anne Graue’s April Poem-a-Day Challenge Yes, it’s National Poetry Month again, and poets everywhere are thinking about writing a poem a day to celebrate while others are compiling lists of prompts to share with those poets. Here is my list of prompts for the month of April! These prompts first appeared in The Westchester Review in 2021. Happy Writing! Daily Prompts Do them in order or mix-and-match! Your choice! Day 1: Check out the history of April Fools’ Day here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/April-Fools-Day. Write a poem without using the word fool, or, in keeping…
Sherine Gilmour Tired Parent Wanting Poem I want to be in a hot tub filled with macaroni and cheese. I want to be sleeping alone in a large bed. I want to be surfing the Internet for new shoes, too expensive for our budget. I want to be asleep while having sex and eating mac-n-cheese. I want to sleep-sex with someone famous and beautiful, but I can’t think of anybody right now. I want to stop hearing bad news. I want the Internet to be only pictures of kittens or babies, not quick news bytes about children killed by…
MER 21 Launch Reading to take place Sunday, May 21st at the Jefferson Market Library in NYC.
Mothers Respond – MER Online Poetry Folio Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featuring: Alise Alousi, Christy Lee Barnes, DeMisty D. Bellinger, Marisol Cortez, Suzanne Edison, Jenn Givhan, Elisabeth Weiss, Jessie Zechnowitz Lim, Natalie Marino, Rachel Neve-Midbar, Amy Ralston Seife, Sarah Sassoon, Lesley Wheeler, Angelique Zobitz Read our March Poem of the Month