I’m not sure how much I was aware of my intention to become a boy. I never verbalized it, and I knew it wasn’t something that was actually possible. I just wanted to be more of a boy than I was a girl. I’m not sure I understand gender very well, even as an adult woman, but as a child, all I saw was that, in a literal way, boys had it better.
The Year I Was A Boy Read More »
We were wrong. It is important to acknowledge that. Wrong, that is, to think, imperiously, that he needed fixing or saving. That is the inherent logic, though, of the multiracial adoptive family, where salvage and repair discourses abound.
I can’t be a pet fish, kept in a tank or pond. It’s a death sentence.
The Story of Ping – Living through Mao & Trump Read More »
Perillo is one of the great practitioners of what the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovskii termed ostranenie, “enstrangement.” Under her pen, figuration becomes a way to capture both the immediacy and the oddity of the body one can neither master nor escape.
So, when she told me not to leave the car as she prepared to respond to a potentially violent situation, I experienced a surge of protectiveness and guilt out of a dereliction of chivalry. I fought the urge to go with her, nodding to show I understood her authority. I became hyper-aware of the straps of the seatbelt binding me to the passenger seat of her police cruiser.
In 2013, Indian American poet, editor, and professor Ravi Shankar was sentenced to a 90-day pretrial detention at Hartford Correctional Center, a level 4 high-security urban jail, for violating his probation for a DUI offense by driving while his license was suspended. During that time, he became the first American academic to be promoted while
Read an excerpt from Ahmed Naji’s “A Rot of Evidence” from our Fall 2020 issue on Persecution. Join us on November 21st to see Naji and contributors from MQR and Sukoon Magazine read virtually at the Arab American National Museum. RSVP here. I carried the green bag containing the clothes they allowed me to keep
A Rot of Evidence: A Journal of Reading and Writing in Prison Read More »
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Reader Bryan Byrdlong introduces Kathryn Nuernberger’s “Ode to Maria Barbosa” from our Fall 2020 Issue. In “Ode to Maria Barbosa” the titular Maria appears almost as a collage, framed by multiple women from different eras (including the author herself). The author draws deftly from award winning Brazilian historian Laura de
Ode to Maria Barbosa Read More »
All the travel, the conversations, the poems, the stories, the essays, the books—none of it prepared me for Gfi Gezati Ethiopa ab Ertra.
“After My Honeymoon” – Author’s Note Read More »
