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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
When They Take the Children by Ellen Meeropol We are outraged at the recent separation of migrant children from their families, but family separation is not new. It has been used for centuries as a political tool to frighten, to punish, to pressure, to terrorize. Think about the sale of slave babies, about Indian children forced into boarding schools, about Nazi concentration camps, about Argentinean babies torn from their political prisoner parents: innocent people caught up in wars and genocide. But how do we feel when the choices of the parents contribute to, or even cause, the separation? Three…
Jayne Martin on writing Tender Cuts “Tender Cuts” is a collection of 38 flash fiction stories, all but two under 300 words, the shortest at just 48. “What is Flash Fiction?” you may be asking. The Meriam Webster dictionary describes the word “flash” as: a sudden flame or flare; to move with great speed; of sudden origin and short duration; brief exposure to an intense altering agent. In flash fiction, we meet characters right at the moment when they are most vulnerable. Our encounters are brief and intense, leaving the reader with an emotionally altering experience. Unlike traditional fiction,…
Review by Carole Mertz Themes of family, marriage, motherhood, forgiveness, and the recklessness of adolescence shape The End of Aphrodite, Laurette Folk’s second novel. It maintains its focus on four females: Etta, Samantha, Mira, and Joan. Men, in this novel, mainly hold secondary positions. The title refers to Etta, a modern Aphrodite, obviously capable of attracting many men. But will she, like the mythical Aphrodite, be denied her truest love? In Folk’s presentation of the lives and loves of these four females, there are echoes of Anne Tyler’s work, and of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. However, the idiosyncratic structure of…
– M.A.M.A. Issue 40 – Anna Perach, Art, and Jane Yolen, Poetry Anna Perach Anna’s practice is informed by the dynamic between personal and cultural myths. She explores how our private narratives are deeply rooted in ancient storytelling and folklore and conversely how folklore has the ability to tell us intimate, confidential stories about ourselves. In her work She synthesises female mythic characters and retell their stories while placing them in the current climate. By doing so Anna creates an experience of eeriness, evoking a sense of both familiarity and distress. Anna’s main medium of work is wearable sculpture…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg What is it about the pressures of forgiveness that plagues and propels us? We live our lives in pursuit of knowledge, happiness, and love, and despite any accolades and earnest gestures toward fortifying our own humanity we manage to be detoured by the regret of our lesser moments and the challenges of our mortality. Chelsea Bunn hits several sensitive and familiar nerves with this eighteen poem collection that reveals and revisits the hope and grief that is threaded through rite-of-passage episodes. These involve missed opportunities, loss, violations (natural and self-inflicted) of the body and morale,…
Courtney Kessel – “In Balance With” and Other Works Courtney Kessel’s inventive collaborative works with her daughter Chloe use Kessel’s initial script or score, but rely on each performer’s interpretations and contributions. She notes, “I guess the best way to describe the work as collaborative is that it mimics our relationship and grows and changes accordingly.” Kessel reflects, “I enjoy giving her agency in the work and seeing where that goes.” In Making Up, her daughter had about an hour to select Kessel’s outfit and do her hair and make-up. Chloe has chosen to participate in each of their…
Review by Barbara Lawhorn In Laura Bernstein-Machlay’s gorgeous debut collection of essays, Travelers, readers journey with an extraordinarily honest author who inquires deeply into place, past, the people who inform us, and how these glimmering threads knot within our present selves. These essays hinge on journeying– to become, to depart and arrive—and, also, to make sense and meaning out of the moments that accumulate into rich, complex lives. Bernstein-Machlay holds up a mirror to her city, her family, and to herself as well, but dives beyond the reflective surface so that the reader must hold up the mirror to…
Review by Cammy Thomas Alison Stone has written three chapbooks, and six full-length collections of poetry, including Masterplan, a collaboration with Erik Greinke, and They Sing At Midnight, winner of the 2003 Many Mountains Moving award. Widely published, she is also a yoga instructor, a psychotherapist, and an artist, who designed a Tarot deck using her own paintings, and who painted the green Medusa on the cover of this book. She lives in upstate New York. Caught in the Myth is well-titled. Essentially every poem in the book is a brief meditation on a myth of some kind, from…