The Mom Egg

BOOK REVIEW: A review of Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe by Carol Dorf

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:05:21 -0400

Amy King
I Want to Make You Safe
Litmus Press
Paperback, 9781933959238,87pp November 2011

Reviewed by Carol Dorf, April 2012

Although it is "difficult to get the news from poems" Amy King's poetry helps the reader notice and pay attention to what is essential. Her poetry juxtaposes disparate aspects of personal history, social context and language providing the reader with more complex understandings of our lives. The second poem in I Want to Make You Safe, "Follow the Leader of my Silken Teeth," provides the reader with an understanding of King's ars poetica, while referring to the art of Janet Cardiff. The poem begins, "And suddenly, art is a hand planted from the wrist/down into the earth's epidermis....We think we know things./Animal shapes. The songs of undiscovered tribes. How to hold baby diamonds. Scratch the fur off why." These images provide the reader with a sensory connection while frequently shifting direction to bring into question whether we actually know what we believe we know.

Many poems in I Want to Make You Safe explore the range of the body's experience from illness, identity, love and sex to having a political body in the world. There are a number of images of giving birth an infancy as in "The Identity In My Crisis" where King says in reference to breaking away from "the language of the fathers, ... This immersion has made me a model/for your captivity digest, a cavity/just as clean as we birthed from a hole, far ago, and embryo buried in the roundest tree hollow..." In these images of birth, King calls into question the story of the fathers, the captivity experience, and instead resituates birth back to the natural world.

This book's final poem "The Opera of Peace," brings infancy images into the idea of milk while she at the same time seeks to "embrace myself/as a childless person born." The narrator refers to herself as "the cradle of maybe," and talks of giving birth to a wren. Here, she uses the power of the images of mothering to honor her own choice as a childless woman.

In structure, I Want to Make You Safe, balances a number of shorter, more lyrical poems like "I Want To Steal The Darkness," where the narrator says, "On my oyster afternoon/the sea's a safety, how we rise/then the grass returns, dune again and the short history of summer..." with longer poems. The longer poems like the title poem and "The Opera of Peace" give King room to work on a large canvas and see how her ideas and images collage together into a lovely expansive understanding of what life is like in these times.

In her essay "Poetry and Commitment," the poet Adrienne Rich said, "poetry has the capacity -- in its own ways and by its own means -- to remind us of something we are forbidden to see...The ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view." I think Rich would have appreciated the intention of Amy King's poetry to open our eyes to the complexity of our lives within our bodies in this political world.

Carol Dorf's poetry and reviews appear in Sentence, New Pages, Vinyl, Qarrtsiluni, Sin Fronteras, Spillway, Hip Mama: The Parenting Zine, The Mom Egg, Canary, In Posse Review, Moira, Feminist Studies, The Barefoot Review, OVS, Fringe, The Midway, and Poemeleon. They have been anthologized in Not a Muse, Boomer Girls, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing, and lives in Northern California with her partner and their teenage daughter.

FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS: A review of Cassie Premo Steele’s The Pomegranate Papers by Ellen Miller-Mack

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:24:26 -0400

The Pomegranate Papers by Cassie Premo Steele  Unbound Content 2012 Review by Ellen Miller-Mack
When I was pregnant with my first son, I told a friend who is from Ghana that I was dreaming every night about food. There were fine restaurants where I would order extravagant meals, or visit caves lined with chocolate walls. She held my hands with tears in her eyes—in her culture food dreams meant hunger. I was hungry, but not for food. I craved mindfulness, living inside my body, inside a lush inner landscape which was both mine and not mine. The chocolate cave walls had messages in an ancient language I longed to understand.
The Pomegranate Papers by Cassie Premo Steele offers an interpretation of the ancient language, with poems about pregnancy, children and the challenges of marriage. From the second poem, “Conception”,
I whispered by the light
Of the night that you were
welcome, and I know now
that you heard me, clear.

Clarity and self-knowledge are present in these poems. The reader is guided steadily through familiar experiences honestly and directly. Premo Steele’s exploration of how we painfully experience our children’s vulnerability pulled me close in “The Truth is I am Afraid,” a beautifully constructed prose poem to her baby:

I am afraid I have made you whole, myself, and if I forget you will disappear, like the flower you neglect to pick that wilts and whithers.

And again, to her child now eighteen, in “For My Daughter”:

I want to enter your dreams at night like an ancient legend.
I want to be the heroine who rescues you from every demon.

Premo Steele uses nature as metaphor in many of the poems in this volume. While inside the poems, the reader is in that dynamic zone of transformation, growth and beauty.
From “Hurricane Season”:
I am not afraid of the seasons,
Not the mountains or rivers or night.
I am the one desert pink flower in bloom.

This is a poet who knows craft and uses it well. Life experiences many of us share as mothers and women are artfully transformed into lovely, precise poems designed to connect us.

Ellen Miller-Mack has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 5 A.M., Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rattle, Verse Wisconsin, Rumpus and Bookslut. She co-wrote The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (PM Press) and is a nurse practitioner/primary care provider at a community health center in Springfield, Massachusetts.

BOOK REVIEW: Multiple Lines of Support: A review by Ivy Rutletge

Sun, 8 Apr 2012 13:04:01 -0400

Multiple Lines of Support:
Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing, edited by Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland; and
Teachers Act Up!: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre, by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Mariana Souto-Manning
Review by Ivy Rutledge

Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing. Edited by Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland. Toronto: The Key Publishing House, 2012. 343 pages.
 In Women Writing on Family, Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland have selected essays written by women with a variety of interests and experiences, creating a valuable guidebook. For most women, writing is a solitary practice, and this book reads like a much-needed conversation with a room full of mentors. The collection starts off with a topic geared to writers of sensitive material, which could be all of us at some point: “Family Secrets: How to Reveal What Matters Without Getting Sued, or Shunned.” In this essay, Martha Engber covers the legalities and the possible emotional fallout, and she offers ways to avoid conflict when writing nonfiction about family. There are strategies for deepening your fiction too, as Yelizaveta P. Renfro shares in her essay, “Creating the Fictional Family: No Character is an Island” (180). Renfro suggests a fun way of getting to know your characters is to think about the family graveyard; she asks questions like “Who will not be buried in the family plot?” (181). The range of advice extends all the way down the process to the business of publishing. For example, Caroline M. Grant explains the nuts and bolts of working with an editor in her essay, “From Pitch to Publication” (247). This collection covers a wide scope, and since each writer is offering information grounded in her own viewpoint, you’ll want to pick and choose the information and voices that speak to your own situation. Chances are you’ll find yourself reaching for this book frequently for inspiration and expert advice.

Teachers Act Up!: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre. by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Mariana Souto-Manning. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010. 169 pages.

 In Teachers Act Up!, Cahmann-Taylor and Souto-Manning have created an important and innovative training program that brings teachers out of their classrooms—which are often isolating spaces—and offers them a safe community. There participants can deepen their understanding of the complex racial, gender, economic, and cultural differences that can lead to oppression. Grounded solidly in theory, the games are fun-filled and make the conversation around oppression more accessible. The authors clearly outline the rules of each game and include photos to illustrate the intended outcome. In acting out multiple outcomes to common situations and reflecting together on the implications, participants return to their classrooms feeling more prepared for the complex interactions they face.
 These games are useful for professionals across other fields as well, especially “Rainbow of Desire,” a technique that uses the rainbow as a metaphor for the notion that “any one individual embodies multiple ‘hues’ that color our past experience and moment-to-moment communication and what we perceive as possible for future action” (112). Participants each add to a dramatic scene, exploring all of the possible influences on a person’s behavior, moving beyond what is perceived to what is hidden. This act of viewing the multiple motivations for behavior and thinking about multiple outcomes encourages practicing teachers and other professionals to move away from one-size-fits-all solutions and towards a more creative and critical approach to solving conflicts. As the authors state in their conclusion, “Through Teachers Act Up!, we learned that not having the answers is a strength, allowing teachers’ collective wisdom to come forth and unforeseen challenges to become known” (138). Both of these books work together to offer insights into a landscape that we often cross alone, and they provide the connections that we, as teachers, writers, and solitary professionals, crave.
 Originally from Rhode Island, IVY RUTLEDGE lives and writes in the Piedmont of North Carolina, where she shares her life with her husband and two children. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Home Education, Ruminate, The Copperfield Review, and Tilt-a-Whirl, and she recently had a story included in the Main Street Rag anthology, Altered States.

FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS: A review of Sarah Cavallaro’s Dogs Have Angels Too by Sandra Ramos O’briant

Sun, 8 Apr 2012 12:57:30 -0400

Dogs Have Angels Too by Sarah Cavallaro
worthy shorts 2011
Review by Sandra Ramos O’Briant

"Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends."
    -Alexander Pope

Sarah Cavallaro’s Dogs Have Angels Too could be renamed “Leader of the Pack or How I Lost Everything, and Found Myself.” Here’s why:

Lena is a fifty-seven year old account executive who has spent more than half her adult life at one New York Corporation when she is laid off. She loses her Upper East End apartment, her husband, and the $250,000 in her 401k to Madoff Securities. Oh, and menopause adds the final flourish to the cascading dominoes of her shattered life. To make matters worse, she has no shoulder to cry on because her ambition and hard work prevented her from making one good friend in all that time. This woman doesn’t even have a casual friend upon whose couch she can crash. She ends up homeless, but not hopeless, and even sleeps in the shrubbery of Central Park.

The views of Central Park and its denizens are colorful, as is the advent of Mrs. Wolf, who may or may not be Mrs. Madoff. Herein lay the twists and the adventure of Dogs Have Angels Too. Most of the novel takes place when Lena is three years into her joblessness. Her transition to the 60-year old dog-walking Miss Pink is a metamorphosis that is largely unexplained. But you must remember that this character has no human friends, doesn’t like hugs, and is a bit of a hard ass. Her job is not merely to walk the dogs, but to find homes for them.

In the process of doing this, Miss Pink makes her first friends, and they’re not all four-legged. Evildoers are outed and Miss Pink finds her life’s work, and it even comes with a paycheck. Sarah Cavallaro’s book reads like a screenplay and it has all the hallmarks of a feel good story. We all know people like Miss Pink: their love, and our love, of dogs is the point at which we connect.

SANDRA RAMOS O’BRIANT’S work has appeared in Café Irreal, Flashquake, riverbabble, In Posse, LiteraryMama, Whistling Shade, La Herencia, latinola.com, and The Copperfield Review. In addition, her short stories have been anthologized in Best Lesbian Love Stories of 2004, What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest (University of Texas Press, Spring 2007), Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, (Bilingual Press, 2008), Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery (Arte Publico (2009), and The Mom Egg (Half Shell Press, 2010). Read her work at www.thesandovalsisters.com and www.bloodmother.com

FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS: A review of Tara L. Masih’s Where the Dog Star Never Glows by Suzanne Kamata

Sun, 8 Apr 2012 12:57:10 -0400

Where the Dog Star Never Glows by Tara L. Masih
Press 53, paperback, $14.00
Review by Suzanne Kamata

In Tara L. Masih’s story “Suspended,” a woman accidentally drives her car off the road and is saved by a tree: “The old tree somehow knows to hold her just so, and when she focuses again, she finds her car is suspended, engine taking her nowhere.” Stuck in its branches, unable to move her body, she licks condensation from the window in order to survive. By the time she is rescued, she has formed a bond with the tree. The unnamed driver experiences a gamut of emotions – anger, fear, relief, love, joy and grief – all in the space of a couple of pages.

Masih, editor of the award-winning Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction is clearly in command of the short short form, but in this, her first full-length collection, she shows that she has the stamina and skills to sustain a longer narrative as well. “Delight,” which stretches out over 15 pages, is a fully realized- and delightful - love story featuring a young woman with a disability selling sweets a seaside confectionary in Puerto Rico and a surfer from the States.

Although slim at 143 pages, this volume encompasses a breath-taking range of styles and settings. The title story takes place in a mining town in the late 1800s, while Champagne Water, one of the longer stories in the book, follows an American couple trying to save their marriage while on vacation in Dominica. “Memsahib” is told from the point of view a young boy living in a village at the foot of the Himalayas on the verge of Indian independence. In “Bird Man,” a woman visits Belgium and Holland, trying to figure out what became of her father during the war.

In every story, Masih evokes the natural world in creating a sense of place and also in creating character. In “Catalpa,” a man is defined in terms of his relationship to a tree, while “The Dark Sun” opens with an expat wife observing the migration of butterflies. In the latter, the narrator’s response to the flora of Mexico, as opposed to that of Canada, creates a sense of foreboding: “Such strange things grow here, so different from the delicate, almost puritan-like flowers in the east. I’m used to paper-petaled poppies; flax petals that fall in the lightest breeze; baby’s breath, an enormous lacy cloud made up of tiny clouds. Here, the brightness and heavy perfumes assail my senses. Bougainvillea chokes the house, portulaca’s fleshy branches spread like a weed along the driveway, and the pepper bushes, harmless now, will be a hazard to the baby.”

Where the Dog Star Never Glows provides a fine introduction to Masih’s poetic language, while taking the reader on a dazzling journey to distant landscapes and forgotten times. This is a stunning debut.

SUZANNE KAMATA
Author of Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008)
Editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, May 2008) and Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2009)