Review by Jane Ward Jen Michalski, award-winning author of 2021’s You’ll Be Fine, returns in June with All This Can Be True. Using alternating narratives, Michalski first explores the complex interior lives of two women as they take stock of their lives after tragedies, before finally weaving the two narratives into a rich story of love and motherhood, daring to live one’s true life, and the awakening of hope after heartbreak. Forty-something Lacie Johnson is on a flight with her husband, heading home after accompanying him on one of his many work trips. In the cross country solitude,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Emily Hall Miranda Schmidt’s debut novel Leafskin is slippery. Part prose, part poetry, the novel begins as a realistic portrayal of a woman struggling to conceive. The protagonist, Jo, is undergoing IVF treatments with Liam, her husband, while they simultaneously navigate deadly wildfires. As the novel progresses, however, the realism gives way to folklore. Jo reunites with her former lover, Ness, a rebellious artist who insists that she is a selkie, a shapeshifting creature that is part-human, part-seal. Eventually, when Jo conceives a child, she suspects that it, like Ness, will be a shapeshifter. Leafskin is…
Melody Wilson The Smell of Lambing —after a comment by Barbara Drake A friend says she’s nostalgic for lambing, for the smell she loves but will never experience again. I imagine lanolin, grass, the birth of kittens—a scent so narrow it tears from recognition. Inside becoming out. My daughter was born to a world of latex and soap. I bled for weeks. The flow contracted from tide to trickle, slowed to a keening thread, then quit. Kittens hadn’t prepared me. No one else was home, so I crouched under the desk as the tabby panted, licked under her tail until…
Submissions Are Open at MER 4/23 – 7/15! We are seeking poetry (1-3 poems), fiction and nonfiction (up to 1000 words) and art for a themed issue on Mothers and Family. Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around us. 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 that address our role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider…
Please join us! “Maiden, Mother, Crone: A Reading Celebrating 22 Years of MER – Mom Egg Review,” on Saturday, May 31, 2025, from 2-3 p.m. at the theater inside Cinema Salem.
Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader Lisa C. Taylor’s novel The Shape of What Remains (Between the Lines Publishing/Liminal Press, 2025) is narrated by Teresa Calvano, a professor, wife, and mother whose second-born child was killed at the age of six. Her story opens ten years after the tragic accident. “I’m living, though my life for the last ten years has been more like the skin a snake sheds. The shape of the snake remains but there’s no substance.” (107) As her story spools out, Teresa—she’s also known as Terri and Tess, depending on the relationship—reveals her deep mourning; her…
MER Bookshelf – April 2025 Curated by Melissa Joplin Highley Alice B Fogel, Falsework, Bee Monk Press, August 2024, poetry These poems refuse sleep. They remind us that life is a cycle of filling and emptying, of finding and having and losing, and that even as hope dips out of sight like a loon, “love / in the end … might still exist.” Falsework, in construction, is a temporary but necessary form that allows what will become the lasting edifice to be built upon it, after which the support structure is disassembled and discarded. In these poems, a…
Review by Sharon Tracey In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, the poet uses the metaphor of fungi to thread a masterful spell of poems that shimmer with dark energy, electricity, and transmutations as she explores childhood, family history, desire, and identity and writes her way toward both understanding and acceptance. Throughout, there’s a search for connection and a recognition of our own impermanence as the work of the natural world toils on with or without us. Poem titles provide a sense of the ride to come. There’s “Sex Talk,” “Dark Energy,” “An Underworld,” “Flammable Almanac,” “Family Tree” and…
Happy Poetry Month! Many of us try to write a poem a day for the month of April, 30/30. I admire those who follow through without stress, but for many of us it seems difficult to “write on demand,” to find the time. As a new mother, Sarah Mirabile-Blacker found her writing practice negatively affected–until she arrived at a strategy to keep her pen moving. Read her craft essay for ideas and inspiration. Sarah Mirabile-Blacker Something New – Haiku One of the greatest things I’ve struggled with since becoming a full-time mom has been staying in touch with…
Review by Rebecca Jane Planetaria re-charts the stars with the poetics of science. Monica Ong, a designer and experimental author, has invented a new genre that spins the literary, visual, and scientific arts to “map us from want to that jeweled inner sky” (11). This book is a fresh experience, like a wander through an art gallery in a newly discovered universe that has always been here. We can say this collection of poetry deals with themes of Asian diaspora, family, and science-based facts superimposed upon the human heart’s layered emotional cosmology. But the kinds of naming and categorization that…