Review by Julia Lisella Laura Page is a visual artist as well as a poet, and that sensibility of the visual comes through in this collection, not so much through the imagery Page chooses, but through this poet’s faith and pleasure in the physicality of text itself, the very shapes of particular words on the page, the textures of sound. Dove, Coyote is Page’s first full length collection, winning the Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry in 2019, selected by Dorothea Lasky. The poems are spare with most poems no longer than 5 or 6 lines. The collection is…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carole Mertz Motherland moves me more than any poetry I’ve read in recent months. Through Sally Thomas’s lines we experience Life as God’s sacred offering to us, and ordinary living, a kind of sacred offering in return. This giving and receiving, both ordinary and extraordinary, is present in almost all of Thomas’s poems, no matter what poetical form the author chose. (She uses the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, and other forms.) A memorable poem opens the collection. Thomas presents “Change-Ringing” (3) in six beautifully rhymed quatrains; the subject, a woman, recalls a time of nursing a child.…
Review by Laura Dennis At its best, flash fiction is a powerful alchemy that combines the best of poetry and narrative. It is also a perfect genre for the present time, when uncertainty and fear have robbed so many of us of our capacity for sustained attention. Still, when I read the structural premise of The Bitter Kind–a series of flash pieces with alternating storylines, written by two different authors–I had questions. How would the compact nature of flash interact with the demands of a longer form, even a “novelette”? I needn’t have worried. Tara Lynn Masih and James…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor What initially struck me about Rise Wildly by Tina Kelley was the imaginative titles of her poems. Titling poems is an art form, and Tina Kelley does it well. Who wouldn’t want to read a poem called “I’m Having the Death I’d Always Hoped For” or “Help. My Mother is Dead. I Feel Light”. The collection is divided into five sections with distinct thematic differences, yet all of the poems are anchored in singular moments of reverence and horror, tempered by the larger mystery of why we are here. The launch into the collection includes…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Shakira Croce’s debut poetry chapbook, Leave It Raw, there is an awareness of the inevitable cyclical journey of life. Though the poems are organized in a linear manner, unfolding from youth to motherhood, there is an underlying cognizance that life, no matter where it begins and ends, is always an odyssey of circularity. Interlaced with this circularity is a profound exploration of the definition of home. From her childhood in rural Georgia to the bustling and near-overwhelming urbanity of New York City of her adulthood, Croce guides the reader through mesmerizing memories and encounters…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Forget Russia is a novel told in two perspectives, that of Anna, a twenty-two-year-old American student, and her grandmother, Sarah, who is living in Russia right before the Russian revolution. Anna’s story is told in first person, and we follow Sarah from a third person point of view. Each section is separated by a full page with the chapter title, followed by either a poem if it’s Anna’s chapter, or a quote from a famous Russian if it is Sarah’s chapter. In this way, each voice is distinct and the reader is never confused by…
Review by Sherre Vernon Jen Stewart Fueston is the author of two chapbooks, Latch (2019) and Visitations (2015), and of the full-length collection considered here: Madonna, Complex (2020). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Her work has appeared widely, in such publications as AGNI, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ruminate, MER and The Christian Century. Fueston is the mother of two young sons and has taught writing internationally. In the audacity of its title, Madonna, Complex asks that we come equipped for exegesis. Before we read her first line of poetry,…
Memories of Mother Inspiration or irritation, role model to be followed or not, our mothers imprint their lives upon our own. These works by MER writers remember and reveal mothers in fiction, poetry, and creative prose. Featured: Tsaurah Litzky – The Sweet Potato Plant – Prose D.O. Moore – Mother’s Day Visitor – Poetry Jennifer Dickinson – No One’s Darling – Fiction Golda Solomon – She Did the Best She Could – Prose Catharine Clark-Sayles – Yahrzeit Moon – Poetry Vivian Montgomery – Her Study, Her Story – Prose Art by Rebecca Spilecki, “A Common Thread” Rebecca Spilecki is…
Vivian Montgomery Her Study, Her Story My mother kept the door to her study open at all times. This is how we knew her work was meant to be interrupted, a sideline to us, a thing she did when there wasn’t something being asked of her. The room was right there on the second floor, at the top of the stairs, the obvious place for an aimless child to go straight into when she wasn’t sure what had brought her upstairs in the first place. My father’s “studio” was in the attic, discouraging in its mustiness and quiet. And of…
D.O. Moore Mother’s Day Visitor My hours hover in abeyance—not the hummingbird suspended in a C before my window’s trumpet-flower feeder. Instead your pause, assessing me. You, turquoise purse and heels, waiting for me to sleep or at least consent to lemon Jell-O when I’d prefer ice cream, to this Home when that spa in Gibraltar would do better. Even one of those tin-wall motels on Route 3. On Tupper Lake in George’s sloop you were just six but already too refined to skinny dip. And me? Within the water’s glistening I laughed and splashed you, prim on the deck…