Review by Deborah Hauser Dirt and Honey, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s debut poetry collection, is a celebration of women as agents of creation in Mexican culture that challenges the patriarchy and assert the power of women to conceive, create, and run wild under the moon. A number of poems explore the theme of domestication, creating tension with the depiction of women as seductresses and warriors in other poems. “Tonight the Stars Look like Labyrinths of Quartz” is a fairy tale-like poem about a woman who climbs a magnolia to collect stars until her husband stops her. But the women in her…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez An intense love transcends most mother-daughter relationships no matter how fraught, tangled, and dynamic they may be. Jill Hoffman’s latest book, The Gates of Pearl, chronicles this intensity with heart-breaking veracity. In her preface, Hoffman—a poet, novelist, and editor—describes the book’s three elements: poems that she addresses to her mother, Pearl; journal entries written by “Pearly” that Hoffman edited; and Pearl’s voice that Hoffman captured from phone conversations. This effective layering drops readers into the psyche of Pearly, then pulls us out through the eyes of Hoffman, shuttling us back and forth on a tight line…
Review by Christine Thomas Alderman “I’ve pretended a lot of things the past sixteen years, but I can’t pretend to feel that” (11). With those words, a woman who has just almost lost her husband to sudden illness, knows she has to leave him. So begins award-winning Dallas Woodburn’s short story collection Woman, Running Late in a Dress, nominated for multiple awards including the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Woodburn’s thirteen interconnected stories chart seismic emotional upheaval that grinds ominously from below and explodes onto the surface of people who might live down your street, or in your apartment…
Review by Libby Maxey A Stone to Carry Home, Andrea Potos’s seventh poetry collection, is the perfect read for mothers seeing children off to college this fall. Although the airy, Mediterranean cover photo might suggest that these poems will be songs of travel, the journey on which Potos takes us is more interior and temporal than it is geographical. Yes, Potos gives us the flavor of Greece—the red wine, the dark coffee, “the slicing and the frying, / the olive oil, lemon and thyme” (38)—but she also gives us the flavor of worry, anger, and aging. She gives us…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett We Became Summer reads like a coming-of-age memoir of a young woman finding herself through time, travel, loss and reflection. This is Barone’s first full-length poetry collection since having two chapbooks published, Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing, 2008), as well as individual poems in numerous anthologies and literary journals. Before reading this new collection, I was drawn in by three things: the title; the cover’s time-travel collage; and the section headings (Heat, Light, Sounds, Home, Breeze). Who would not be curious to know more, to follow…
Review by Carole Mertz Nancy Gerber is the author of A Way Out of Nowhere, an elegant collection of nine worthy stories. She earned a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University and a M.A. in Psychoanalysis from the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis-NJ. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Mom Egg Review, Adanna, and elsewhere. Gerber writes about relationships among teenagers and young adults, and relationships between teens and their parents, especially between daughters and mothers. She writes with authority, both with regard to her subject matter and with reference to her writing skill. While many…
Review by Elaine Terranova “Little wing or fin,” says the headnote defining aileron, the hinged part of the wing in a fixed wing aircraft. The title poem serves as a preface. It explores means of transport, beginning with this mysterious image, “Once I rode a one-eyed horse/ to a tree house in the forest.” (7) In a book of poems the right symbol informs the poems but likewise, as in Aileron, the poems give tone and weight to the symbol. The narrator identifies with the aileron as she herself becomes part of time and movement and the continuation of…
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 32nd edition of this collaboration in which scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA Art: Sophia Marinkov Jones The works are from a series that reflect different moments in a day as a mother and child interact. These…
Review by Anna Schoenbach Swap/Meet is a series of nine short flash fictions in the style of a classified ad or online notice of sale that reveal the intricate stories behind mundane, everyday items. Susan Rukeyser, author of Not On Fire, Only Dying (Twisted Road Publications; finalist for the 2016 Lascaux Fiction Prize) has brought those stories to life. The objects for sale are given meaning because a memory is attached to them. A pair of baby shoes, a horse-themed sculpture, a book collection, and a resized pink prom dress – each one becomes a rich and vibrant portrait…
An Archival Mothering We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi, Eds. Review by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz For this memoriam, Jordan’s ode begins immediately. At first glance the cover is simply black and white, but a closer look reveals the art of a soft grey woven whisper of a (maternal) quilt or distant fence, fraught with possibility. This webbed image set to full bleed, anchored by a black band, is how one enters. Whereas in most books the front matter of praise and accolades, copyright, partial list of works, and embedded quotes may be overlooked, for…