Review by Lisa C. Taylor Lori Desrosiers’ third full-length poetry collection, Keeping Planes in the Air builds a narrative about the ways in which family history plays out in the most mundane of moments. The poet grapples with power and perceived power, like a mother conjuring safety for her children when they fly, praying that the planes would stay aloft. The rational and irrational trade stories as family legends are passed through generations. The poem, “My Grandmother Shoplifted” tells a story of longing for glitter and trinkets, perhaps as the grandmother’s mental acuity deteriorates. This longing for power, both…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carla Panciera Veronica Montes’s The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting, winner of Black Lawrence Press’s Spring 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition, includes eight pieces of flash fiction. Her first collection, Benedita Takes Wings and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Philippine American Literary House. Though Montes’s rich language and startling imagery are arresting, it is the women themselves who compel the reader. Perhaps it is the rigid requirements of the genre, but these characters do feel isolated. Thus, an intimacy exists between them and the reader. Montes’s stories are also reminiscent of the oral…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor A Place Remote by Gwen Goodkin is a debut short story collection populated by unique characters that embody small town America. Life’s tragedies are on display in these stories, as random acts determine the individual character’s direction. If there was a theme for this collection, it might be the the unpredictability of life and the certainty of death. In the story, “A Boy with Sense”, a young boy witnesses his father’s drinking and infidelity leading to the breakup of his parent’s marriage. Carter finds a role model in Poppy, his grandfather who lives and…
Review by Janet McCann As a crone poet whose childbearing years are decades past and mostly forgotten, I found this collection brought everything back graphically. The physical and metaphysical elements of childbirth became real again—hyper-real. The poems evoke strong body imagery that resounds with soul-deep reverberations. The sensory images pleased me immensely, though they did not make me want to go through that experience again. It is also satisfying to read a sequence of poems that represents a personal narrative that is also a shared women’s story, a myth that is also a truth. Samantha Kolber received her MFA…
MER Vox Quarterly – Winter 2020 December 15, 2020 Mother is Speaking: An MER VOX folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Mother is speaking. She is the quiet voice that speaks the loudest, especially when we are out of balance. From state violence to a global health crisis, the call for healing is louder than ever. These poems and stories speak from the perspective of the cosmic, divine, limitless mother. The mother who lives in the ocean, the trees, in every form of life on the planet, and also within the deepest depths of our subconscious mind. Mother is speaking.…
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Mother is Speaking: An MER VOX folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Mother is speaking. She is the quiet voice that speaks the loudest, especially when we are out of balance. From state violence to a global health crisis, the call for healing is louder than ever. These poems and stories speak from the perspective of the cosmic, divine, limitless mother. The mother who lives in the ocean, the trees, in every form of life on the planet, and also within the deepest depths of our subconscious mind. Mother is speaking. These works reveal what she has to say about where we’ve…
Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali Miracle Again we split open and don’t die life crowns from within every woman every where Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali is an actor, director, playwright, and producer. She has worked off-Broadway and in regional theater nationwide and is currently Associate Professor of Theater for Social Transformation at the UMass Amherst. As a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa, she created Brown Paper Studio, an applied theatre methodology. She is the author of a memoir For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku.
Barbara Conrad Beauty Queen Her shoes are bolted to the linoleum floor. Practical flats, black and rubber-soled. In a top drawer next to the sink, fistfuls of used tin foil — no waste, no wishes. Before she swapped her office job for a new last name and this tidbit of a life, before she was my mother, she might have been a beauty queen (or a kindergarten teacher she once told me). Now she stands at the window dreaming of fairies with green wings dancing on the lawn. I’m making this up — but look. One is holding a…
Breena Clarke Mama Ascended I have communicated with those who would know. Mama and Papa and Harold and Alice were welcomed in the afterlife, following their harrowing deaths. Their souls were luminous. They said that Mama ascended in the most beautiful sea-green, diaphanous summer dress that ever there was, that there wafted an aroma of gardenia and that there was an infant ready to become the new vessel for her soul. I was heartbroken not to have died at Mama’s side as I had always planned to do. I had accepted the near certainty that I would leave Mama…