Dorsía Smith Silva Requiem my son asks for a baby brother for Christmas / so easily / like going to the drive-through / to get some ubiquitous made-to-order meal / Big Mac with extra cheese / onions and lettuce / what does he know / about the parade of prayers / shoehorned hormone shots / straitjacketed waiting / then nothing / but wind-blown ebbed echoes of please Jesus / hear me Jesus / sweet baby Jesus / another round of stolen surrender / then another / more blood enjambed / scything in rogue repair / someone / tell…
Author: Mom Egg Review
New and Coming Soon Sarah Gutowski, The Familiar. TRP: The University Press of SHSU January 2024. Poetry The Familiar is a narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis. It mimics the bizarre, darkly funny experience of midlife by making literal the multiple “selves” that women often have to embody and employ just to support a family, create a career, and maintain relationships. Fabulist and absurdist, this book features a mix of high and low language, philosophy, and pop culture while exploring the effects of second and third-wave feminism. It’s a book for anyone who’s vacillated between dreams, desires, and ambition on…
Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger In Cathy Ulrich’s second book, Small, Burning Things, she proves again how mighty flash fiction can be. These tight short stories are mostly women- or girl-centered, and all of the fiction brought in some uncomfortable aspect relationships. Small, Burning Things solidifies Urich’s position not only in the world a flash fiction, but in fiction in general. The first story, “A Burning Girl,” starts as a fairy tale would. “There was one day at school that one of the girls start on fire.” Such an absurd line compels the reader forward, including this reader, which…
Review by Melanie McGehee Amanda Galvan Huynh’s debut poetry book Where My Umbilical is Buried tells her Chicano family’s story. It is a scrapbook journey, taking us through towns of rural Texas and the lives of three generations, beginning with Huynh’s grandmother. It is an exploration of leaving and settling and of morphing into one’s surroundings and clinging to one’s heritage. I easily went along with Huynh to each place and into the lives of each woman. Her poems were extremely approachable. Several poems from Huynh’s previous chapbook, The Songs of Brujería, are included here in this fuller collection…
Review by Jessica Manack Dedicated to her mother, the second collection of poems by Francesca Bell, What Small Sound, is a group of ruminations on being mothered and being a mother, and the way the former informs the latter, yet can never fully prepare one. Among a backdrop of natural and organic phenomena, she describes nurturing under extreme duress, in a world where hate, violence and cruelty color every day. Bell deftly balances the dual desires to praise and lament, from the first poem, in which the animal pleasures of feasting and running are mashed up against the news…
Review by Jiwon Choi Frances Donovan’s Arboretum in a Jar is an assertive and confident work in which the poet’s voice feels tautly woven into the cacophony of internal dilemmas and S.O.S mayhem fueling this who’s who in the fairy tale diaspora of our 21st Century. Donovan, whose previous work explores themes of family, home, sexual/gender identity, and intergenerational trauma, has given us much to consider and untangle in a poetry collection that comes on as a rambunctious coming of age drama set in a Teenage Wasteland. A wasteland that is an interstitial ecology of urban decay and…
Review by Sarah Lyn Rogers In Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise, two sisters buckle under lifelong pressure from their mother, Rita, who immigrated with their father, Jing, from Taipei and made enormous sacrifices to ensure that the girls would have an ideal life—which, to Rita, means a dutiful and financially successful one. This searching, often darkly humorous novel follows Eleanor, the “successful” daughter and scientist, who we learn never truly liked science—or is even especially good at it—but did enjoy the rare praise she received from being perceived as the studious one. Now, reckoning with her mother’s…
Review by Julia Lisella In Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s fourth collection of poems, Transitory, an epigraph from Carolyn Forché instructs: “‘Poetry of witness’ . . . doesn’t mean to write about political matters; it means to write out of having been . . . incised or even wounded by something that happened in the world.” What a gorgeous way to begin this heartbreaking tour through the year 2020, a deadly year in the U.S. for transgender and gender non-conforming people, though sadly, not an exceptional year according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Bacon stands both inside the torrent of…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg The poems in Carolina Hotchandani’s stunning debut comprise a woman’s journey to the self through many guises—daughter, scholar, mother, poet—and reveals how identity can be a fragile construct, whether inherited, imagined, or influenced by those who are deeply connected to us. These contemplative and elegantly crafted poems examine, in revolving sequences, the delicate process of reinforcing one’s identity in the sharing (and preserving) of familial and personal narrative, especially by those with fading memories who gave us life or whom we bring into this world and overwrite our stories with their own. In “Once You…
Erica Bodwell Child, Mother This child, who started as autumn leaves blown against the house, paper crane with a secret code folded inside, dream from which I believed I’d awaken, untroubled, to the old landscape—as easily as setting out milk for stray kittens. This child, who emerged from my sliced-through womb as flame flickering in a liminal space, threatening to be extinguished. When the nurse waiting at the ER doors lifted him from my arms, I collapsed on the sidewalk, twigs flattened underfoot, the vibrating ground echoing my lone beating heart. Who would teach me how to be less…