An interview with Marjorie Tesser was featured in a new mother-artists magazine, MILKED. Here’s some info about the magazine: Containing an intentionally curated body of work, conceptually driven and visually focused, MILKED is a new publication that focuses on the undertones of the maternal figure. Styled like a newspaper but published as a book, this full color, 8.5″ x 14″ publication features 76 pages of visual art, photography and the written word by international, female artists. MILKED is an independent project, initiated & curated by Lee Nowell-Wilson and designed by Darin Michelle. Both artists. Both mothers. For more info, or…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Laura Dennis Single parenting can feel like a high wire act performed with no safety net, the empty platform forever just out of reach. Letting go of a bad marriage may have saved my soul and ultimately made me a better mom, but it can get pretty lonely up here. Enter We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor, a collection of poetry, essays, and quotes by writers both famous and less-known. In 2015, nearly two decades after her divorce, editor Marika Lindholm founded Empowering Solo Moms Everywhere (ESME). That community inspired the present…
Review by Emily Webber A Girl Goes into the Forest by Peg Alford Pursell shines light on the transitions and transformations we go through in life and the changing relationships between parents and children. In each of the 78 hybrid stories and fables in the collection, Pursell conjures up the magic and darkness of fairy tales. These stories span the times and places of a lifetime, showing how people seesaw between knowing and unknowing and from life to death. It is clear from the opening line in the first story that Pursell’s characters are searching: Tentative, curious, uncertain,…
Review by Kimberly Bowcutt Ana C. H. Silva’s recently published chapbook One Cupped Hand Above the Other is a perfect addition to her many existing published poems and artwork to elucidate her continued conversation that poetry is, as she said in a Spence School interview in 2017, “often about what we don’t know, what we’re trying to understand.” This collection explores the ways we try to make sense of the unseen forces that propel us through rites of passage. Silva’s use of metaphor, words that encapsulate multiple meanings, and divination symbolism all beautifully illuminate the moments of metamorphoses. The palmistry…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen In Haitian poet M.J. Fievre’s latest book, “Happy, Okay?” readers are catapulted on a journey through the psyche of a woman navigating mental illness. Though these poems punctuate anxiety and depression, they are also abundant in the redemptive power of hope and joy and just may, in the end, offer salvation. The first part of the book is arranged like a Greek play with a chorus of three characters involved in a sort of call and response format. Two of the characters are lovers, José Armando and Paloma, struggling to reconcile their life together and…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Ah, the kiss, a gesture so ingrained in our cultural imagination in so many guises. We have Rodin’s immortalized smooch elegantly rendered in marble; Klimt’s glittering, embracing couple; Romeo and Juliet’s tragic buss; fabled frogs turned princes with a peck; Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photo of a spontaneous clutch and smack of a sailor and nurse in Times Square celebrating V-J Day; the dreaded kisses of Judas and the God Father; the magical transformation in Craig Lucas’ play, A Prelude to a Kiss, of an ailing old man who kisses a bride on her wedding day; and Snoopy’s…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Geraldine Mills is a poet and fiction writer with five collections of poetry, three short story collections, and a children’s novel, Gold. Her numerous awards include the RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition, the Hennessey/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer Award, a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship and two Arts Council bursaries. She is a mentor with NUI Galway and a member of Poetry Ireland Writers in Schools Scheme. Her fiction and poetry are taught in Contemporary Irish Literature classes at the University of Connecticut, the University of Missouri, Emory University, and at the Emerson College Summer…
“As Far As Wishing Goes” Review by Cammy Thomas Melissa Crowe teaches in and runs UNC Wilmington’s MFA Program. Author of two chapbooks, Cirque du Crève-Coeur, and Girl, Giant, she has published widely, and is coeditor of Beloit Poetry Journal. This is her first full-length collection. Crowe grew up in Presque Isle, Maine, very far north, in a large, complicated, working-class family. Food was sometimes scarce, and quite a few people lived on the edge of hunger, violence, addiction. But there was also connection, and love. This powerful book progresses chronologically, beginning in childhood and extending to her own…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson I have a special place in my heart for “definition poems.” It’s what I call poems that take the idea to lay out the meaning of a word and repurpose that definition for their poem and often in doing so, subvert and shift the very definition. They are subtle and powerful, taking something so simple and recreating it. I was delighted to find a definition poem opening Latch, a collection of poems by Jen Stewart Fueston. And it’s a beautiful one. Latch sets us up for a complex web of poems, like the latching definition, “where…
Review by Sherre Vernon Tasslyn Magnusson’s chapbook Defining opens with “dreams of obliteration” (1) and closes with the short declarative sentence, “I speak” (22). Defining does not offer itself as a typical poetry collection. Framed by four lyric micro-poems, two in prologue, two in epilogue, Defining is an extended hermit-crab poem that defines eighteen seemingly unrelated words, in alphabetical order. Each word is offered as one or more parts of speech and provided a standard definition. In each lexicological entry, Magnusson uses Rare and Uncommon definitions, followed by example sentences with the defined word in context, to unfold the history…