Congrats to our nominees! POETRY Anna Abraham Gasaway – The Kenmore Refrigerator Elinor Ann Walker – I will hunger Nicole Greaves – Scars R. Erica Doyle – Wander Caridad Moro-Gronlier – For My 21-Year-Old Son, Who Cals Me on The Day Roe V. Wade is Overturned Natasha Herring – To Bake a Black Boy with a Dash of Dyslexia PROSE Harriet Bailiss – The Line
Author: Mom Egg Review
Natalie Solmer I Am a Great Lake My youth was Everclear spilling slicking the table, its decks of cards, the phones that didn’t exist in our pockets or hands but Euchre. We learned it in school playing in our plaid skirt uniforms. My friend licked the liquor up. All of us licked the liquor up until I had to stop. Until alcohol became old as me. I am as old as the rusted out mini-van we drove around in, blasting The Score. I am old as the bats that swarmed the summer evenings around the baseball stadium lights, the…
Portuguese- American Writer Katherine Vaz, and Portuguese Artist Madalena Pequito In Conversation With Ana C.H. Silva This June I attended the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the first time I’ve ever been part of a larger Luso/as (Portuguese) gathering beyond family dinners – perhaps if you don’t count that Maritza concert I attended at Carnegie Hall! Our families hailed from the Azores, Portugal, Brazil, and Cape Verde, so we were a diverse group, but we could see especially from our writings that certain strands rooted in language and familial culture connected us. …
I was not given meaning, so I had to make it By Jiwon Choi I can’t say that I was feeling overtly political during the drafting of A Temporary Dwelling, my third poetry collection (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), but I do acknowledge that I am distrustful of the Mainstream Culture seeing how it tries to jam unhelpful messages through my keyhole. A slightly contradictory statement coming from someone whose childhood was taken up with voraciously imbibing what the MC had to offer, primarily in TV form whilst waiting for the parents to get home. Yes, I was a child in…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley New and coming soon: notable books with a focus on motherhood and women’s lives. Joan Kwon Glass, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Perugia Press, September 2024, poetry. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent questions: What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating…
Review by Jordan E. Franklin For those of you new to Sarah Sarai, she is a NYC-based poet and editor with a prolific publication record spanning several collections. While most poets experience a lag in their work and output, Sarai has experienced no such thing as evidenced by her latest book, Bright-Eyed. This new work manages to retain its power, intimacy, and tenderness despite its brevity. According to Dictionary.com, the word “geography” refers to “the topographical features of a region.” Normally, this pertains to physical spaces such as countries and landscapes; Sarai begins Bright-Eyed with a dedication to her…
Review by Elizabeth Brown The Fiction of Stillness is Robyn Hunt’s second collection of poems. Her first collection, The Shape of Caught Water, was published by Red Mountain Press in 2013, winning the New Mexico Press Women’s Association Award in 2014. Additionally, Ms. Hunt has co-written a one-act play with Evangeline Brown which was produced by Theaterwork in Santa Fe, as well as published numerous poems in literary journals. This collection details all aspects of a cancer diagnosis and struggle to beat it. Organized into three sections, the poems highlight the ups and downs of the journey of the…
To you who took flight suddenly: a review by Jennifer Jean In her introduction to Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960-2023, editor Mojdeh Bahar tells us that the jay in the title is a desert crow that is camouflaged while marching on its stout legs but is expressively gorgeous when taking flight. This image is an apt representation of the poets in this exquisitely curated bilingual anthology of Persian poetry by women from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Bahar, in her introduction, and the poets as well, talk of taking refuge in the soaring words…
Review by Jane Ward Imagine walking along a pier with your children. Your daughter points to something, a bird circling the ocean, perhaps, searching for fish. Your eyes leave your young son for one minute, or less–an instant. When you turn back to smile at him, he is gone. Every parent’s nightmare–that a moment’s lapse can result in a forever tragedy–is the premise that launches Cynthia Reeves’s exquisite novel, The Last Whaler, a tale that unfolds within the world of 20th-century Norwegian whaling, against the backdrop of a relentless and unforgiving Arctic. In 1937, whaler Tor Handeland and his…
Sarah Browning Borrowing Happiness from Tomorrow It’s so dry this year the sycamores are shedding their enormous leaves, palms of crackle and nerve littering the yard mid-August, while exhaust from futuristic mowers the city hauls from rec center to rec center hangs gray over our neighbor Joan’s roses; we require the morning – the atmosphere, we say – to absorb it all faultlessly: noise, exhaust, our fecklessness. I woke at 5 this morning. It’s cooler for a change. We’d thrown the windows wide in celebration and as I fretted my bladder and whether to wrench my suddenly old and…