Coming Soon: Mom Egg Review vol. 18 – 2020 “HOME” Welcome to Mom Egg Review’s eighteenth annual issue. We are proud to publish fine literary work centering on diverse experiences of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The new issue of Mom Egg Review considers the nature of “home”— Is a home a place, a feeling, a center, a community? Home land. Home base. Torn between homes. Unhoused. Also home neighborhood, others’ homes, away from home. The earth as home. Can work be a home? Can a poem be a home? Mom Egg Review writers explore “Home” through the lens of…
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Review by Cammy Thomas It took a moment to figure out that in Barbara Ungar’s new book, Save Our Ship, the little dots and dashes in the alphabetical Table of Contents were letters in Morse Code, having to do with each poem’s title. As it turns out, Save Our Ship is an SOS (…—…) to and about our world. Some of the SOS’s are on a large scale, as in “Naming the Animals,” an abecedarian listing extinct species, sometimes with notes: Passenger pigeon. Martha died alone at 1 p.m., Sept. 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Pinta Island tortoise.…
–M.A.M.A. Issue 41 Michele Landel, Art, and Ann E. Wallace, Poetry Ann E. Wallace, Poetry Closed Close the door. She looks at me like I am ridiculous. But I only left it open for a minute. A girl raised by a father has not had to think much about the reasons a family of girls keeps the door closed and locked. A family of girls knows the unwanted will enter closed doors, will penetrate locks uninvited. We do not need to leave the door open for them. “Closed” was previously published in Mom Egg Review vol. 17.…
Review by Lara Lillibridge It was only a quirk of zoning that Carol Ann Davis’ son didn’t attend Sandy Hook, which was physically closer to their house. In this collection, written with markers such as “two years before, four years after, after five years,” every essay exists in relationship to that day. That thread of what if courses through the book: But in the weeks that follow he corrects me: I was in the music room. If it had happened at Hawley I would be right there, the first classroom in the building. It would be me. (11) And yet,…
Review by Claire Keyes Ghost Dogs is fierce, funny, horrible and yet beautiful in the way O’Reilly’s language transforms the details of a gritty life into striking lyric poems. It’s the tale of a mature woman (one of her poems is titled “At Sixty-Two”) whose childhood rivals the horrors of Dickens’ David Copperfield. The powerful, funny speaker of these poems was an abused child, her mother the most cruel abuser. Her only sources of comfort were dogs. In the title poem, “Ghost Dogs,” we learn that these were 200 pound mastiffs. Writing of childhood beatings in “Safety,” O’Reilly cites…
Review by Anna Limontas-Salisbury Glory to All Fleeting Things reads like a Baptist Church Revival testimony. A testimony in black church vernacular is the story a believer of Jesus tells or testifies about life’s rough times. At the end of a testimony, it is not unusual for the one doing the testifying to shout, glory! In a testimony the source of triumph is usually attributed to the Christian prophet Jesus. While there is no mention of Jesus in this testimony, the word “glory” in the title speaks to the fortitude of the human spirit. But before we get to glory,…
Review by Emily Webber Maria Giura’s memoir, Celibate, focuses on her decade-long relationship with a Catholic priest and her journey to find her true vocation in life. As a lifelong Catholic myself, one who has wrestled with my faith and is still trying to figure it out, I approached this book with mixed feelings. I was unsure of what to expect, worried the book would be a salacious tell-all about Giura’s affair with the priest or that it would romanticize religion’s putting up the front that if one has a good enough faith, then everything is sunshine and rainbows.…
Review by Ana C. H. Silva I read Rage Hezekiah’s Stray Harbor as a newly (early) menopausal person, so tears don’t spring up in my eyes as readily as they used to, but goodness did they try. Her language is direct, honest, precise, pulling into itself her vast reaches of life experience and imaginings. I learned beautiful, perfect words I feel like I should have known forever, like “sororal” and “accroach.” A single poem, image-packed, can make quick turns, compress whole stories, story-tell in quiet filmic zooming ins and outs during the short spaces between stanzas. Rage Hezekiah, a MacDowell,…
Review by Jennifer Martelli In her prose poem #59, Sonia Greenfield asks What is it about a sick boy that renders him gorgeous? . . . . Is it how I can gather all of your heat to me and feel the fight that boils there? Is it how illness begets stillness and stillness makes portraiture? Boy in a mother’s embrace—your head burning against my shoulder, your body overflowing my lap. (87) Sonia Greenfield’s Letdown, a collection of 64 prose poems, seeks to explore the “gorgeousness” of a “sick boy.” Greenfield’s poems recount the story of quickening, labor and the…
Review by Kimberly Bowcutt To cleave: A contranym, “cleave” is metamorphosis and movement, blessed beginnings and violent ends. It is complicated. Barbara Rockman’s newest collection of poetry to cleave is a contemplative exploration of how love is sustained in an incongruent world. This collection can be enjoyed line by line. In an interview with Miriam Sagan, Rockman says that to her: relationship to the line is an ongoing exploration…my lines tend to be fairly short which allows me, and I suppose the reader, to readily see and feel into the kernel of their meaning. When I aim to create…