Review by Carla Panciera Jane Ward’s fourth book, Should Have Told You Sooner, is both a journey novel and an exercise in time travel. As one of the novel’s youngest characters wisely observes: “‘We tend to think of life as a straight line until we’re reminded it’s lines that sometimes fold back on themselves or go in circles and figure eights’” (198). That is certainly the case in these pages, where characters not only visit the past, but where they are forced to examine how events from that time that are beyond their control shape their present and their…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Deborah Leipziger, Tell Me, Lily Poetry Review Books, February 2026, poetry Tell Me is a love letter to nature and to daughters, to the Beloved and to our future ancestors. These poems celebrate the poet’s Brazilian identity and her history as a daughter of refugees. The trans poet, Joy Ladin, writes: “A profoundly wise, humane and generous collection, Tell Me constantly generates and celebrates connection: between body and world, art and nature, individual life, and the sweep of often painful history. Overflowing with wisdom, tenderness, and celebration, Tell Me encourages us to recognize that…
Megan Merchant, Author of Hortensia, in winter Interviewed by Melissa Joplin Higley MJH – When and why did you first start writing poems? MM – I was an odd kid and instead of writing diary or journal entries, I wrote poems. Looking back, they are very endearing and hilarious. However, it wasn’t until undergrad that I gravitated toward poetry as an intentional art form. Despite the loud warnings that I could never make a career path from poetry, it was the thing that made me feel the most alive. MJH – Who are your main poetic…
Walking with Beth: Conversations with my hundred-year-old friend by Merilyn Simonds Review by Melanie McGehee Award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, writer of more than twenty books across genres, reached her seventieth birthday with a specific longing: she wanted a guide for the years ahead. In Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend, Simonds finds that guide not in a manual, but in a relationship with Elizabeth Pierce Robinson (Beth), a woman three decades older. Merilyn and Beth are acquaintances, both active in the literary and arts culture of Kingston, Ontario, when COVID-19 is in its early days, and Beth…
Unvarnished Animal: A Review of Shari Caplan’s Exhibitionist by Hannah Larrabee In her prize-winning collection, Shari Caplan opens with a poem invoking the incomparable Marina Abramović: Here is the gallery of my body. (…) You’re not supposed to chew the pomegranate seed. This is how I imagine our relationship: You, reader, the mouth opening to all my red beads … (1) You might be familiar with Abramović’s living exhibit at the MoMA—how she couldn’t help but break her stoic gaze when she looked up and saw her former partner, Ulay. Desire is at the heart of Exhibitionist, its clarity…
Review by Emily Hall Nora Lange’s short-story collection, Day Care, is a piercing exploration of womanhood and fulfillment. The follow-up to her debut novel, Us Fools, the eighteen stories in this collection center on women who feel unsatisfied and neglected, despite having partners and/or children. While many writers have explored the hollow promise of domesticity, Lange brings fresh perspective to this, as she illustrates how women use fantasies and daydreams to regain their sense of fulfillment. Although the characters in these stories face mundane challenges, like neglectful partners and overbearing mothers, Lange amplifies the tension by infusing these conflicts…
Review by Suzette Bishop In Dear Letters in the Red Box by Sarah Stern, her fourth poetry book, poems lift off from story, memory, dream, everyday experiences, and a deceivingly plain-spoken language, shapeshifting into something ethereal. Reading through a box of her mother’s papers after her passing spurs Stern to ruminate on what was given to her. Among those gifts she shares with the reader are family stories of endurance, Jewish ancestry, New York City, and how to live intentionally and deeply “in a strange factory of trees and words” (54). Her mother’s poems and love letters between her…
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason One of the most difficult parts of becoming a mother—even before a baby is born—is the worrying that never, ever lets up. There are worries during pregnancy that continue if and when the baby is born and then as children grow up. Even adult children cause great worry to their mothers, no matter how well adjusted or happy they may seem. Rebekah Denison Hewitt captures these many emotions in her new poetry collection, Creature in Bloom, which comes out just in time for Mother’s Day this year. Hewitt has mostly called the Midwest home and…
Review by Sharon Tracey Both narrative and elegy, Preeti Vangani’s poetry collection Fifty Mothers explores grief and loss triggered by the death of her mother to breast cancer at age 41. With her passing, the poet and her father become “a ministry of less” (1) in a kitchen where take-out replaces home-cooking as the poet remembers and records. Set adrift without the anchor of her mother, Vangani shows us that “mother” is too small a word for what becomes, over time, a matrix of women—including aunts, sisters, mothers-in-law, and cousins who offer a kind of spiritual guidance, appearing in…
Welcome to MER 24, the Mothers & Family Issue! Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around them. Family of heritage, family of birth, family of choice, our greater human family: our families can be sources of support, of exhaustion, of love, of pain. Our families can pass down to us lore or trauma. For MER 24, we are exploring poems, prose, fiction, and artworks that address the role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider with and untangle these familial threads that can heal or hinder. The cover image is by Nan…