I have seen how the Detroit community of writers and activists looks out for and supports young artists. It is something I experienced as a young writer as well. I don’t know if that exists in other parts of the country quite like it does here. I hope it does.
The Necessity of Community: An Interview with Alise Alousi Read More »
Write dreadful things. When I was younger—and even now, more often than I care to admit—I was very precious about my writing, afraid of how it would be judged by the audience I was imagining, even if that audience was just my future self. So I painstakingly labored over everything, refusing to share anything unfinished and often giving up entirely. Looking back on that writing, I still find it dreadful—a lot of good all that worrying did! What I wish I had done was write a lot more; you can see a lot farther standing on a mountain of garbage than a single, meticulously crafted step stool.
People of MQR: A Q&A with Aaron J. Stone Read More »
Ultimately, the poems themselves in Mask for Mask arise out of smoke. You reach to grasp something, and out comes a letter or a word, and out of that word is triggered a memory of some sort of self that had been tucked away that has been let out from behind the mask or the cage
Letting and Letting Go: Mask for Mask by JD Scott (New Rivers Press) Read More »
But I admit that now, after doing this for so many decades and nearing 70 years old, I write because that is what I do. I can’t imagine not doing it or doing something different. It is my self-definition.
Politics as Central: An Interview with Keith Taylor Read More »
By thinking of these poems as invitations and scores, as open-ended instructions for how to see and feel one’s self in space, I hope to activate new perspectives.
Unlocking Our Imaginations: An Interview with Petra Kuppers Read More »
Sometimes I look at him, and he’s a medical doctor, so he’s been aware of death and the possibility of death and mortality daily, but I sometimes look at him and think, Oh, you’re not an orphan. You don’t understand. I feel that that is a profound change. It’s a kind of wisdom. It makes you porous in a way that is, I think, positive.
Becoming Porous: An Interview with Kathleen Graber Read More »
When a poem is sent to the world, like a letter inside that bottle in the sea, a community of readers associates it with some meaning, familiar or unfamiliar, and they add their own layers of meanings to it, and that's what makes it alive. The poem offers space, and readers immigrate to it. In poetry, I am the native citizen who welcomes others, the way I was welcomed by others who came before me.
Aesthetic enthusiasm: An Interview with Dunya Mikhail Read More »
Growing up Mexican American, particularly growing up Catholic, we have this connection to saints and holy figures and the possibility of miracles in the normal every day. It makes multiple realities possible at the same time.
It is Possible to Live with Ghosts: An Interview with Carribean Fragoza Read More »
According to his website, Cortney Lamar Charleston is a poet whose words “paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present.” Identity, he says, is, “functionally, a transition zone” between “race, masculinity, class, family, and faith.” In his latest collection, Dopplegangbanger, there is a conflict of the soul. The opening poem, “The Unauthorized Biography of
The Polarities of a Black Boy: a review of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Dopplegangbanger Read More »
The first Sarah we meet in Sam Cohen’s debut story collection, Sarahland, goes by the nickname Dr. Sarah (even though she is only a pre-med undergraduate) because there are just too many Sarahs in her friend group. Sarah A., Sarah B., and Dr. Sarah sit in a college dorm room that smells “perpetually of microwaved
Mirrors and Portals: Sam Cohen’s Sarahland Read More »
