Review by Emily Webber The title of Laura Rock Gaughan’s wide-ranging and engaging debut collection Motherish comes from the short story, “Woman Cubed.” Dale is a contortionist preparing for an upcoming performance where Cirque recruiters will be in the audience. She imagines her dead mother present: She visualized the performance necessary to win over the Cirque: transcendent, personal best. Her special fan would be in the stands, boosting her chances. And Mama, admittedly not perfect, but motherish in the way she’s always been in life. Pushy and mouthy and indisputably on Dale’s side (148). This collection of thirteen stories…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lara Lillibridge Carley Moore is an essayist, novelist, and poet. The Not Wives is her debut novel. (Last year, Mom Egg Review reviewed Moore’s debut essay collection, 16 Pills). The Not Wives, set in New York City just before and during Occupy Wall Street, it is an explicit and gritty yet authentic and unapologetic exploration of issues of womanhood, motherhood, class and wealth in today’s society. I’m not regular. People think moms are boring and not political, but some of us are broken, queer, crazy, loud, sex-positive poet single mamas so don’t underestimate us or call us regular.…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez Lauren Carter’s second book of poetry, Following Sea, summoned crisp winter air into the humid heat of my July afternoons. As Carter chronicles her ancestors’ journey into the Canadian wilderness and reflects on experiences with infertility, I wanted to tease her thread-lines from the sky and weave them around my body. The silk ribbons her words made slipped around my neck where they’ve stayed—stories sure and snug—despite the days that have passed since I closed the book. With its keen imagery and sharp insight, I think you’ll find Following Sea a compelling read as well. In…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Dorothy Rice earned her MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside, Palm Desert, when she turned 60. Gray is the New Black is a coming of age memoir for those of us who took a little longer than others to write it all down. Rice discusses being a daughter, sister, mother, grandmother and wife with an unflinchingly honest and unquestionably relatable pen. Although I’m more than a decade her junior, I saw myself on the page over and over—often painfully so. But although Rice is merciless in her examination of her life, she is never…
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Reading & Book Launch Intersection on Neptune Winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018 The Poetry Press of Press Americana (2019) Bridgewater Public Library Somerset Poetry Group 1 Vogt Drive Bridgewater, N.J. Wednesday, September 4, 2019 7 p.m. http://www.donnajgelagotislee.com
Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering, and Travel Edited by Charlotte Beyer, Janet MacLennan, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Marjorie Tesser Review by Stephanie May de Montigny In Travellin’ Mama each of us likely will find something that resonates with our own experiences of the challenges and joys of travelling as mothers. But every reader also will find something new through which they may learn about different lives and perspectives, both past and present. Edited by Charlotte Beyer, Janet MacLennan, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Marjorie Tesser, this diverse collection assembles essays, poetry, and scholarly analyses, all centered around mothers’ experiences of traveling…
Review by Tasslyn Magnusson Released in late April 2019, The Dancing Clock by Nancy Gerber is a collection of related essays on the passage of time viewed through a gorgeous prism of her personal experience. They are intimate and profound and jump from the biggest questions—how humans survive trauma—to the next biggest—how we become more than the roles assigned for us, mother, daughter, wife, friend. Gerber suggests in the opening Prologue we do this when we acknowledge our mortality and dance with life. She asks us to join her in acceptance and through that, in a new sense of…
“Nothing Was Simply One Thing” The Bones of Winter Birds by Ann Fisher-Wirth Review by Cammy Thomas Ann Fisher-Wirth is an accomplished writer, scholar, and Fulbright recipient. A professor at the University of Mississippi, she has written many books of poetry and prose, including co-editing The Ecopoetry Anthology with Laura-Gray Street (Trinity UP, 2013). The Bones of Winter Birds is her most recent book of poems. I read this book with an eerie sense of recognition. Like Ann Fisher-Wirth, I have lived in Mississippi, learned French, loved Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, had a mysterious sibling, been to the…
Review by Barbara Lawhorn Dedicated to her mother, who passed away nearly a year earlier, and organized in four sections, Lisa Hase-Jackson’s Flint and Fire is a journey of seeking, actively becoming, leaving, returning to, and fashioning anew a sense of home in an unfamiliar terrain. The poems are rooted by the credible, nuanced voice of a first-person speaker, who reflects upon and acutely observes the world, while trying to determine her own place in it. Hase-Jackson’s attention to the natural world, and the speaker’s own rich internal landscape, provide for narrative poems that expand beyond their measured stanzas,…
Review by Lara Lillibridge The winner of Dzanc’s 2018 Nonfiction Prize, Knock Wood is the first work of nonfiction by Jennifer Militello, whose previous honors include the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize, and the Tupelo Press First Book Award. This book centers on intertwined elements: a mentally ill aunt in an abusive marriage, a criminal high school sweetheart who eventually dies of a heroin overdose, Militello’s life as a mother and her aunt’s experience raising her daughter, and an extramarital affair. Events appear to influence each other regardless of chronology. There could be no outcome. There…