Jennifer Jean on Where do you live? and Mojdeh Bahar on Silence and Lost Words: A Conversation on Translation MER is pleased to present an interview with two authors on their recent books of poetry in translation: Jennifer Jean on Where do you live? and Mojdeh Bahar on Silence and Lost Words. Jean and Bahar then interviewed each other, leading to an intriguing and revealing conversation. Enjoy! JENNIFER JEAN ON WHERE DO YOU LIVE? Where Do You Live? is a bilingual, collaborative collection of questions and responses in Arabic and English, written and co-translated by Iraqi…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Curated by Melissa Joplin Highley Marjorie Maddox, Seeing Things, Wildhouse Publishing, February 2025, poetry With its focus on memory, illness, and their ramifications, Seeing Things explores overlapping roles of a daughter whose mother is entering the beginning stages of dementia and of a mother whose daughter is struggling with depression. These poems also witness a woman juggling her own memories of abuse and survival who lives in a world unsettled by shifting boundaries of truth and fabrication. Ultimately, Seeing Things explores the ways that we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, see or disregard those around…
Review by Jiwon Choi In Slip, Nicole Callihan, author of chigger ridge, This Strange Garment, SuperLoop, The Couples, and many more titles, offers up poems that are in full force of their elegant and vivid language, poems that are gleefully punchy and cranky, poems that reveal just how much upheaval we must deal with in the day to day living of our lives. Upheaval which we, as the poet reminds us, bring upon ourselves and bring upon others. This is revealed right away in the book’s beginning poem, “Stick”. The stick in question, found “at the mouth of the…
& You Think It Ends poems by Amy Small-McKinney Review by Rebecca Jane & You Think It Ends opens wounds and exposes their lasting impact. Rape, gun violence, genocide, unsafe abortion, drug abuse, emotional abuse, bird extinction, and widowhood form the psychological landscape of these poems. For comfort, the poet offers a blanket, choices, time, and memory. When we least expect it, the aging body gets a voice. The wise woman reminds us, “we inherited sorrow / we also inherited strength” (35). With all this sorrow, how do we find the strength to heal and transcend? Amy Small-McKinney, Montgomery…
Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron Three years ago, I resigned from my lawyer job to write a novel. The seed had been planted two years prior, during our pandemic lockdown. In November 2020, my 4th and 6th graders and I embarked on a challenge: we enrolled in the now-defunct NaNoWriMo program and each spent thirty days drafting our first novel. My children’s stories were wild fantastical romps, fully-formed and primed for several sequels. Mine was an ode to my maternal line. Finishing it, I realized, was going to be a full-time job. At press time, it’s 2025. And while I…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Elizabeth’s Sylvia’s new book presents itself modestly: My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties contains only twenty-four poems, and their tone (like the title) is low-key. But such a book isn’t “little” when it’s a forceful, principled embrace of wit, complexity and understatement. In poems that take a range of forms (pantoum, sonnet crown, shaped poems among them) Sylvia strips domestic life of its banality. The experience of being a wife, mother, daughter, beekeeper, and teacher comes across as insistently embodied and strangely unsettling. Household objects, for one thing, are a little eerie. “I have an…
Review by Emily Webber When reading Flood, Christine Kalafus’s debut memoir, there’s a constant feeling of being pulled by raging waters, swept up into something you can’t control, the feeling of waters rising and rising, and you can’t do anything to stop it. There’s a good reason for this. Kalafus, in the immediacy of the present tense, is describing both literal and metaphorical floods. The moon is wide, red, and does not help me. When I collide with knotted roots and rocks, I slip, silent. I could stop, talk to the factory workers. Take my chances. I’m a…
“We bring you here to see dead things—” A folio of the supernatural in motherhood * As we enter autumn, the veil between the living and the dead things becomes gauzier; time seems to take on a different meaning. As Tzynya Pinchback says in “Menarche,” “everything now is before and after, everything now is before and after. Something wild in us all.” The poems in MER’s September folio center the supernatural in motherhood. In “Orchard Revisited,” a poem rich with the smell of ripe apples, Diannely Antigua writes of her miscarried nephew, “my sister and her husband waited //…
Diannely Antigua ORCHARD REVISITED for Andrés In the beginning, there was no word. So I called him baby apple, conceived in September. I fell in love with the seed, as if it were my own, so happy I would be—the single, queer aunt, always late for the parties. At the root, to miscarry could mean there was a wrong way to cradle what only the insides could touch. At home, I boiled the water, lit the rose-scented candle. In the hospital, my sister and her husband waited to meet their dead son. At the root, to miss could mean…
Erin Armstrong THE WEIGHT OF BODIES My grandmother cared and carried the weight of bodies. Her ghost stands in the street to speak of bodies. Her ghost stands in the street to speak to bodies. I dug a hole to plant her a cherry tree. I dug a hole to plant her a cherry tree and held the weight of her silent emotion. I held the weight of her silent emotion. I’m tired of asking photographs to speak. I’m tired because photographs won’t speak. She raised her three boys so they would talk. She raised her three boys so…