Lorraine Currelley Domestics (For: Domestics, Our Unsung Heroines) gentrification invades our eyes with its growing visual stench. our love putting food on our tables, cleaning invader’s homes. it is our need we hear, when their children call us by our first names. we fold into ourselves, never dismissing this herstorical violation. diamonded mothers stroll casually, speaking on phones and window shopping. while we domestics disguised as nannies push carriages, with children old enough to walk. there is no equality in this poem, only constant reminders of ancestral enslavement, apartheid and their grandfathers jim crow. no neighbor, no friendship, only their…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Sandra Crouch The Miracle The way the bush beans begin with curls and winding our story grown from seed not with the motion of bodies meeting and meeting again but inside the thick yellowing leaves of the soon-potatoes, the flattened shape of an animal, sleeping A city garden holds no heavy weight of danger, no fierce predator but this gentle whorl of the feral cat who wails at night and by day rushes from our footsteps like the ghost of our first child We weren’t ready so we held in our arms the air and nodded gently like calyptras…
Jodi Boulton The Badlands They say they’re the result of two geological processes, deposition and erosion. What I know is this: The earth there rubs like dry, gritty clay and is the color of putty against my palms. Alligator fossils, Amethyst haze sunsets, and my childrens’ silhouettes against the striations and water marks – the architecture of ancient epochs. And now we stand in the kitchen our six hands molding the flour adding the water, salt, and egg, creating rugged peaks, our Brule and Sharps, on the cool black granite. Chemistry of rain, sand and wind, of water, salt,…
Review by Michelle Panik The book jacket for Dallas Woodburn’s collection of short stories, How to Make Paper When the World is Ending, describes itself as “the ghosts of what might yet be and the ghosts of what might have been,” which was intriguing enough to pique my interest. When the blurb subsequently posed the question, “How is each of us shaped by what haunts us?” I knew I had to read this book. While so many collections are organized around a subject matter, a setting, or a character, it’s rare that one operates within such an elliptical theme…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Elina Eihmane, a Latvian artist, filmmaker, poet, and mother based in Taipei, Taiwan, has published a gorgeous, handmade feast of visual poetry, One Day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum through The Emma Press (March 2021). Inviting to the touch, the book is 36 stapled risograph pages. The back of the book frames this chapbook-length work as a love letter from a mother to a son, but, importantly, the book also surrounds the mother writer with a healing compassion that reaches out to other mothers who have suffered difficult births and challenging postpartum…
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi For My Daughter Not with the milk coursing through my breast but with the sap singing in my unwritten poems did I feed you. Long nights, until the glowing of dew on every lonely leaf; I was from head to toe a pair of open eyes, to cool your fever simmering the sea of my words . Long days, closing the white notebook of my desirous moments, I followed your tottering steps in the parks and playgrounds to reach the unreachable dandelions. Every morning breaking the pure silence of sunrise, with the noise of the juicer I…
Review by Anna Laura Reeve Kirsten Shu-ying Chen’s impressive debut centers her experience caring for her dying mother, and the established structures and systems that erode under the influence of that grief. These poems exist in a liminal space, functioning both as the small light of human perception glowing in a universe of dark matter and as an eye, pupil dilating and constricting, as the light changes. It’s a kind of through-the-looking-glass guide to life after such a life-altering loss, a dotted line tracing the journey from the certainties of the beforelife to an acceptance of paradox, which is—Chen…
Review by Carla Panciera Remember when you discovered that Disney hadn’t gotten it right with their version of fairy tales? How they’d left out the rape of Sleeping Beauty, for example, or the fact that it was Snow White’s mother who sent her seven year old (!) off to be butchered by the huntsman? Well, Mary Lou Buschi’s second collection of poetry, Paddock, is a contemporary reminder: women face many dangers, whether they are the mythical protagonists who journey throughout the pages of this collection, or the very real women who will recognize their own stories of loss and trauma…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Terra Incognita follows Sara Henning’s much-lauded View from True North, co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. In her second collection, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Henning offers the transformational knowledge of how grief drops into our bodies, reframes our memories, and binds us to our lost beloveds. And she does so with exquisite wordcraft that harnesses our emotions. I highly recommend this book for a range of readers: those who already love poetry, and those who would benefit from this gorgeous…
Review by Lynn McGee A design motif on Pools of June by Mary Meriam is the image of bubbles. They appear on the cover, fill an illustrated figure diving into water on the frontispiece, tumble skyward on the title page and encircle page numbers in the table of contents. Every scuba diver knows that bubbles travel up, toward air. Disoriented underwater, it’s wise to follow their trail. Likewise, each poem in Pools of June is a body of water navigated by a speaker who moves in directions the reader might not expect, but which always break the surface into…