Review by Barbara Harroun Joelle Biele’s Broom, recipient of the 2013 Bordighera Poetry Prize, studies life with such microscopic precision and attention that the daily cracks open as wondrous, perplexing, and miraculous. The poems, printed in English and translated into Italian on the mirrored page, gave me new eyes, new occasions to see, and lenses with which to reflect on the life I bring with me to the page. Devoid of sentimentality, these poems inquire into the webbed experiences of navigation—navigating motherhood and writing and traveling and illness and remission and the natural world. Biele’s rich imagery, diction devoid of…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Mindy Kronenberg As her introduction to the evocative and carefully rendered poems of Untrussed, poet Christine Stewart- Nuñez uses a quote from Louise Glück who advises against poetry being read as simple “autobiography” and rather as narrative that “draws all the materials of life” including love with its risky and thrilling outcomes, and life experience/revelation that uses “the self as a laboratory in which to practice, master, what seem to you central dilemmas.” (qtd. in Grace Cavalieri’s The Last Word: The Poet and the Poem). The poetic construct that follows includes poems that alter episodes of intimacy with…
Sundress Publications has featured a panel put together by Mom Egg Review, “Baby Steps: How to Nurture a Great Writing Career After Having a Child,” as part of its AWP Roundtable Series. M.M. DeVoe of Pen Parentis, J.P. Howard of Women Writers in Bloom Salon, Julianne Palumbo of Mothers Always Write, and MER Editor Marjorie Tesser discuss strategies, challenges and opportunities for writers who also parent. To see the discussion, please follow the link below. https://sundresspublications.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/awp-rountable-with-m-m-devoe-j-p-howard-julianne-palumbo-and-marjorie-tesser/
Review by Lisa C. Taylor This beautiful anthology, with its meditations on a motherland in relation to both country and transition couldn’t be more relevant to our times. Beginning with a knockout poem by Beth Ann Fennelly, “Latching On, Falling Off,” the reader is invited into the hypnotic state of a new nursing mother: “Soon, soon—I am listening—she swallows, / and a layer of pain kicks free like a blanket” and “Once, I bared my chest / and found an animal. Once I was delicious” (10). In Part IV, she addresses the cocoon of motherhood and also its profound isolation:…
Review by Grace Gardiner The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop isn’t Diane Lockward’s first walk around the poetry block. In this “collection of poems, prompts, craft tips, and interviews for aspiring and practicing poets,” Lockward—author of two chapbooks, four full-length poetry collections, and The Crafty Poet II’s elder sibling The Crafty Poet—demonstrates both her insight and skill in elucidating the many-faceted ways in which a poem pulses into existence on the page and in the ear. The collection is remarkable in the scope of voices it offers as teacher and example. Lockward structures the book into ten sections, each…
Review by Tessara Dudley Theory Headed Dragon is the first chapbook from Carol Dorf. Dorf is a high school math instructor and the poetry editor at Talking Writing, and though these two professions seem somewhat contradictory, in reading Theory Headed Dragon, they began to seem perfectly natural together. In fact, the poet brings many different aspects of life into conversation with each other to tease out truths about humanity today. A major theme of this collection of poems is time: the passage of time, and the idea of impermanence. In “The Early Morning Train,” Dorf comments on generations, not just…
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 20th edition of this collaboration in which scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA January 2017, Christen Clifford and Karen Malpede “The Pussy Bow” by Christen Clifford After live-streaming from her vagina, artist Christen Clifford decided to take…
Monica A. Hand departed this week. She was a brilliant poet, artist, and scholar, a loving mother and grandmother, and a long-time valued member of the Mom Egg Review community. She will be deeply missed. Here is a poem from MER Vol. 10 – The Body Monica A. Hand DiVida becomes pine evergreen coniferous with needle-shaped leaves woody cones. her thick and sticky sap turpentine her scent voluminous, audible her arms her legs her buttocks her head her toes something to sit upon soft like a cushion hard like the frame of a crypt the wood of any pine is…
Megan Wynne Artist Statement: I am interested in the transgenerational legacy of the mother-child dynamic, in which beliefs, behaviors, and past traumas haunt one generation to the next. In the Motherhood project, I work in collaboration with my two daughters and investigate my role as a mother in the context of the maternal legacy that I inherited. Through experimental and performative explorations in and around the home where I was raised, I reflect on the weight of the past as it is transmitted through me and will continue through my two children. In the work I use my maternal…
IDENTITY A folio edited by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach The poems in this folio consider the “Mom” identity from both the mother’s and child’s viewpoints and speak to the complicated relationship that exists between the iconic Mom and Mom as an individual. Each of the poems challenges us, in its own unique way, to confront the person that we may or may not want to be (or know) behind the Mom mask. As the speaker in Megan Merchant’s poem, Fallout Shelter so aptly states: I never even thought / that just once / my own mother / might…