Review by Sharon Tracey In Perforated, Chloe Yelena Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, the poet circles the center of things, observing and remembering. In her hands, words are gathered around portals between the outside and inside as well inside the body of memory, with places for language to land and embed in. Hands that light candles, drop coins in a collection box, mix olive oil and salt; hands that rest under the hand of a child. Hands that fill a jar with anything that needs a container, to be held. Inside these intimate poems, the poet celebrates the details…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Elizabeth Paul Susan Ayres is a poet, translator, and lawyer who teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law. She is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies, a chapbook that journeys through inner and outer landscapes. Ayres’ second chapbook, Red Cardinal, White Snow, explores intergenerational mental illness and family trauma. Dedicated to her mother and daughter, this collection provides glimpses into the lives of these women, both of whom lived with mental illness. It also brings readers into the narrator’s experience as a daughter and mother seemingly tethered to tragedy. Yet the links between mothers…
Review by Mary Ellen Talley We enter Laura Garrard’s debut poetry chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, with “Paddling the Sweet Spot,” a poem in quatrains that introduces readers to strength and strategy in water sports as it instructs how to aim for “a diagonal / In between the edges of waves.” However, that perfection is tenuous and “not easy to maintain” (5). The above hint of metaphor becomes apparent when we read the second poem about this speaker’s cancer diagnosis in “My Body Speaks.” With the first line comes revelation, “I ask my body why…
Review by Melissa Kutsche Hitler and My Mother-in-Law by Terese Svoboda focuses on the life and career of the author’s mother-in-law, Patricia (Pat) Lochridge Hartwell. Hartwell was the first woman hired in news at CBS Radio, worked for UNICEF, and was the first female journalist to report from both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters during WWII. In Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, Svoboda highlights how many of Hartwell’s stories have taken on a legendary quality after years of being told to family and friends. “Sometimes her sons say she lied or at least stretched the truth. She was Texan, what…
Review by Cameron Walker As I read Samina Najmi’s moving essay collection, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, I was reminded of a game we played as children in our school library. We’d gather around the globe and set it spinning. Then, one by one, we’d set out fingers down and imagine the lives we’d make wherever the globe had stopped. The globe spins and stops and spins again throughout this collection: here on the grandparents in India; there on Najmi’s childhood in Karachi; now London, then back again to Pakistan. These essays follow…
Review by Emily Webber The characters in Suzanne Kamata’s short stories in River of Dolls are often caught between cultures, wishing for things they don’t have, and in transit to their next job, relationship, or new home. Big things happen quietly as they navigate everything from small disappointments to major life changes. Good intentions often don’t produce the desired results. Kamata, the author of another short story collection and several novels and nonfiction books, has spent half her life in Japan. Most of the stories in River of Dolls are set there, focusing on women and girls, where ordinary…
MER Bookshelf Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Preeti Vangani, Fifty Mothers, River River Books, February 2026, poetry Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker’s Bombay home. Pierced with joy, with music and sweat, traffic and smoke, the collection layers family dynamics, gender roles, and the pain and pleasure of the speaker’s body, while drawing a living, lyric line between the “gone mother” and daughter. These poems are the fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs for the grown children of mothers living in a world that…
Off Site. On Purpose. AWP 2026 Wednesday, March 4, 2026, 7:00 PM Westminster Hall, 519 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (Free Admission – Doors Open at 6:30 PM) SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present: Off site. On purpose. SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present “Off Site. On Purpose,” featuring many of today’s most inspiring women and nonbinary writers and poets! Join us for a night of life-affirming poetry on Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 7:00 PM (Doors open at 6:30 PM), Westminster Hall, 519…
MER at AWP–All the Info! Off site. On Purpose. You’re Invited! Off Site. On Purpose. AWP 2026 Wednesday, March 4, 2026, 7:00 PM Westminster Hall, 519 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (Free Admission – Doors Open at 6:30 PM) SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present: Off site. On purpose. SWWIM, MER, NELLE, Whale Road Review, Perugia Press, & Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry present “Off Site. On Purpose,” featuring many of today’s most inspiring women and nonbinary writers and poets! Join us for a night of life-affirming poetry on Wednesday, March…
This year, MER is examining the ins and outs of mothers with families, both online and in our forthcoming print issues. Often mothers are the nuclei of families—of the legacies, obligations, and stories that orbit around us. Family of heritage, family of birth, family of choice, our greater human family: our families can be sources of support, of exhaustion, of love, of pain. Our families can pass down to us lore or trauma. We are exploring creative writing and art that addresses our role as mother in these unwieldy units, how we embroider with and untangle these familial threads that…