Author: Mom Egg Review

Review by Sarah W. Bartlett  – Amy Dryansky’s newest poetry collection, Grass Whistle, was awarded the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. While writing this collection, Dryansky began a blog about the intersection of mother/artist/poet in her own and in other women’s lives. The blog establishes her mother/artist work as both important and interesting. The true gift of Grass Whistle is the proof that we can use whatever is at hand to make what we need. Every poem shines with transparent honesty about aspects of life and relationship we have been socialized to hide: “what I imagined spilled out, slopping/fake fairy dust over everyone/I couldn’t quite…

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Review by RZ Wiggins  – Mothers are simple, complex, opaque, vivid, loving, distant, devoted, and neglectful, all in a lifetime. From its first pages, this slim volume overflows with the above and with a mother’s abundant love and commitment. Rosalie Calebrese’s chapbook Remembering Chris is a memorial to a lost son. But the collection also shows the many sides to mothering through a voice that is at once surprisingly pragmatic and refreshingly honest. Aside from “Mixed Emotions” (3) which centers on mothering concerns (how many mothers haven’t felt these?), Remembering Chris’s poems ring with joy at both motherhood and grandmotherhood. Given the absence…

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Review by Barbara Harroun  – Samantha Duncan’s intimate, inventive, and gloriously imaginative chapbook-length poem The Birth Creatures examines and gives new eyes and voice to the post-partum experience. Duncan, the author of the chapbooks One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) and Moon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), explained the genesis of The Birth Creatures in a Blogging the Numinous interview with Julianna DiMicco: The Birth Creatures came from a few places. I wanted to reclaim my own postpartum experience, which I felt had been downplayed and not taken very seriously by those around me. I also think not enough is said about how bizarre pregnancy and childbirth are, so I…

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Review by Kerry Neville  – Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deeply ingrained in both popular and academic culture (spin-offs, references, paraphernalia, and the academic journal Slayage).  Josh Whedon, the series creator, has explained that he explicitly developed Buffy as a feminist revision of the horror genre, taking as its center Buffy’s fight against universal monsters: loneliness, awakening sexuality, social norms, and oppression. Indeed, Buffy, our complicated heroine, the Slayer, born once in a generation, is tasked with protecting herself from the ordinary challenges of high school and the extraordinary challenges of vampires and demons, and with saving the world.  But what…

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Review by Jennifer Martelli  – From the opening title poem where we are told, “Never mind what your mother says” (3) to the closing poem “Chained Reaction” where Betts writes The top of my mother’s hand is tan shallot skinand her shelter a crosshatched clam, a sealed mouth hiding sealed hands (64-66) Genevieve Betts creates a seismic movement across a continent, a country, a body in her debut collection, An Unwalled City. The reader is in “this limbo” where “flows blood from the breasts that give suck” (“Isis” 14-16). In the thirty-eight poems that make up this collection, Betts births and unearths…

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Review by Christina Mock  – Marianne Smith Johnson’s collection Tender Collisions is a rollercoaster of the loss, grief, joy, and love we experience every day. It pulls the reader out of the routine of daily life to remind her that life is fragile, and the human body breaks easily. The collection is divided into three stunning parts tied together thematically by the need for justice. Johnson brilliantly exposes the reader to the intimacy of daily life as a wife and mother. A private moment between spouses is lit up in “Duende Teases up the Night” through Johnson’s description of sounds: “When…

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Review by Ann Fisher-Wirth  – Wisdom, wit, and compassion characterize Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s first book of poems, Imperfect Tense. A Professor of TESOL and World Languages Education at the University of Georgia, she charts her extensive terrain in the book’s first poem, “Whorfian Hypothesis”—which, as a note explains, asserts that “one’s language determines one’s conception of the world” (115). The engaging poems of the book’s first section, “Imperfect Tense,” grew from a Fulbright in Oaxaca during which the poet interviewed Americans tackling Spanish as a second language. Here are befuddled ex-pats who say “I’m pregnant” when they mean “I’m embarrassed” or “fuck a…

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Review by Bunny Goodjohn  – His office is covered floor to ceiling / in photos of infants’ faces / stuck to the walls with long needles. / I lie upon a bed lined with butcher paper. (29) Experiencing life vicariously through poems—on falconry, on surviving an earthquake, on growing up blind…on whatever—fascinates me. Those poems open up worlds I am unlikely to visit. But there is something magical about poetry that hands over a known world. Such poetry opens a conversation that is full of questions: how will this poet narrate my world’s landmarks, its streets, its currency? might I remember…

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Review by Mindy Kronenberg  – No one wants to talk about the sick child. Corrugated sadness, apologies baited with fear the mousetrap faces of those with healthy kids, shut. The difficult truth of these 21 skillful poems by Suzanne Edison on a mother’s challenges with a child’s chronic illness is crystalized in these lines from “Teeter Totter” (p. 16). It is truly a delicate yet brave exercise to express poetically the trials and hopeful episodes that rise from both fear and love. Women poets have dealt with the intimacy and revelatory moments of watching loved ones suffer and struggle, whether…

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Mothers in Publishing: Changing the Literary Landscape – Join us on Saturday, May 7, in the Dewitt Wallace Periodical Room for “Mothers in Publishing: Changing the Literary Landscape” with editors Sarah Gambito (Kundiman), Karen Phillips (Words Without Borders), Mariah Ekere Tallie (African Voices Mag), Marjorie Tesser (Mom Egg Review), and Rebecca Wolff (Fence) about balancing the creative difficulties and benefits of editing with the creative experience of motherhood. This panel discussion features a diverse group of literary decision­ makers who will address questions including: What does it mean to be a mother working in publishing? How do we define the…

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