Review by Jane Ward “It’s pitch black and Alice won’t stop screaming.” (4) Two pages into The Fun Times Brigade, author Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and I am fully transported to my own early days of mothering an inconsolable, colicky newborn. The sleeplessness, the isolation, the need for a break and the equal but ironically opposite unwillingness to be out of reach of the child. The blur that is one day to the next. My experience is well in the past. The novel’s main character, new mother Amy, is in the throes of…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carla Panciera In the latter pages of award-winning author Laurette Folk’s newest novel Eleison, a young priest struggling with his vows declares, “‘I often think of what Augustine said, how the disorder of the soul is its own punishment.’” (99) In these pages, Folk examines her characters according to, if not their disorders, then certainly the thoughts and behaviors that haunt them. What ensues is an exploration of what it means to be a flawed (and thus very human) being who seeks the kind of mercy one might expect to find in a book so titled. Folk’s…
Review by Sharon Tracey In tether & lung—Kimberly Ann Priest’s second full-length poetry collection—the poet threads finely wrought narrative poems borne of unrequited love and desire, grief and trauma, and the scent of shame never far off as “every animal has its own master.”(3) Divided into four parts (The Gelding, Her Hand, A Tether, Of Lungs), the sections also echo the four chambers of the heart and the lungs each partner tries to inflate, even as a marriage has lost its oxygen and died. There’s also generational history here, the recurring discomfort of bodies not feeling true. Priest invites…
Amanda Auchter IMAGINARY SON: WATER I could say there was a flood and my body the boat that kept you safe. But my body was only temporary, and would buckle come morning. I would let you live in each part of me: eyelid, elbows, clavicle. But now you are being held by the fluorescent ether like a bowl, a bird, a wailing god. You take your first damp breath. This is all yours. Your own splendid body. Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and…
The most perilous part of girlhood is that it ends: on Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood Review by Anna Rollins Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays speaks of topics such as sexual violence, eating disorders, miscarriage, and medical motherhood. In Fraterrigo’s essays, adolescence is painted in golden strokes, sunny poolside summers and slam books at school. And while violence often awaits the narrator in these idyllic scenes, the true danger lies in the passing of time: when the pages of girlhood turn to womanhood. Fraterrigo’s memoir in essays explores how the inevitability of aging and death impacts one’s…
Review by Rebecca Jane Incidental Pollen delivers wisdom relating to the experiences of being a nurse, the patients’ courage, and the vistas of grief, spanning verdant mystery to papery decay. These poems bare witness to the degradation of natural resources while also paying homage to bees, trees, nectar, pollen, imagination, and longing. Ellen Austin-Li’s debut collection contains narrative poetry that awakens the heart. Incidental Pollen has received recognition from Trio Award, Wisconsin Poetry Series, and Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. As the cofounder of Poetry Night at Sitwell’s in Cincinnati, Austin-Li also shows up as a poet who has a…
Review by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice In her most recent and Pulitzer-prize nominated collection, Bone Country, author Linda Nemec Foster takes readers on a breathless tour through Europe and especially her beloved Poland. Yet, these crystalline prose poems are no flaneur or tourist takes; they are attempts to grapple with belonging and boundaries, to reify the bridges to those who are bone-close, yet unreachable. In a collection whose title calls to mind Dickinson’s “Zero at the Bone,” Foster circles, approaches, and retreats, touching those places and people both vital and ultimately unknowable. Foster is the author of 14 collections of…
Review by Susan Michele Coronel “What a woman knows, she tells slant,” Alison Stone writes in her ninth book of poems, Informed (New York Quarterly Books, 2024). In this stellar collection, Stone employs a variety of traditional forms through a strong feminist lens, addressing themes of loss, time and memory, the struggles of childhood, adolescence and dysfunctional family life, as well as sex, politics, pop culture, the lives of famous women, and the pandemic. The book is divided into four sections. The first and last sections are devoted entirely to pantoums, the second to ghazals; the third is…
Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley Lisa Marie Oliver, Birthroot, Glass Lyre Press, December 2024, poetry (chapbook) The poems in Birthroot explore themes of new motherhood, loss, renewal and the natural world. This chapbook follows the first months of pregnancy, through birth and toddlerhood—a time period that includes the loss of marriage, postpartum anxiety, wildfires, and family grief. Throughout the poems, the link between mother and child is revelatory, transformative and rooted in the natural world that surrounds them. Rebe Huntman, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, Monkfish Book Publishing, February 2025, creative…
Review by Melanie McGehee In her latest book, Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell, long-time educator and writer, finally tells her own story. Her prior books celebrate the lives of what might be considered ordinary working people. In them, she honors millworkers, farmers, and blacksmiths, particularly those of the post World War generations that she’s familiar with in North Carolina and Virginia. In Otherwise, I’m Fine, Presnell continues highlighting what is quite ordinary—ordinary, as in common—as she unpacks grief and family estrangement. When her father died in 1969, Barbara Presnell was fourteen years old. Her older sister was in high…