Inner Rivers
I do not know how to shed my childhood, this old snake’s skin. My childhood weighs on my bones and hinders all my movements.
MQR Online
Dispatches From Lesvos
I am at the meeting point at the jetty by Mytilini Harbor just after 8 am. A lone slender bearded figure sits and smokes by the quai (he is H___ the barber, I learn later). Instead of approaching I retreat to dash off a sketch of the harbor mouth and a little coast guard tug against the rising terrain.
Dispatches From Lesvos Read More »
Found Fairy Tales: On the Art of Joanna Concejo
A pencil. A piece of wood encasing a graphite core that can draw in a thousand hues of grey and black. The memory of the first attempt at writing, the hardness of the wood between uncertain fingers, the exertion of small force on the paper and finally, carefully drawn marks of different thicknesses and angles. Joanna Concejo’s many works evoke this forgotten memory of our graphite past.
Found Fairy Tales: On the Art of Joanna Concejo Read More »
“Thermal Gestures:” A Review of W.S. Graham, NYRB Poets Series
Graham is not a poet of language so much a poet of mark and gesture. His fundamental unit of work is not the word but the expressive stroke. That is to say: he’s just another Cornish Expressionist, like his friends.
“Thermal Gestures:” A Review of W.S. Graham, NYRB Poets Series Read More »
A Giddy Lurch into Chaos: China Mieville on Brexit, Writing Books as Video Games, and Lachrymose Europhilia
At the time of the discussion, the tenor of the mainstream pro-Remain discourse – with honourable and important exceptions, most of which were and are clear-sightedly and with a heavy heart more anti-anti-Remain than pro–was to my mind at a particularly politically and tactically dunderheaded pitch, and this is reflected in my remarks. I stand by this critique.
Excavation
After my dad died and my mom’s worsening dementia forced her into a care facility, it fell to my sister and me to clean out their house. When we walked inside, it was like uncovering an intact archaeological site. My dad’s closet was still filled with his fleece jackets and golf shirts. Inside the pantry, opened bags of potato chips and crackers were sealed with clips. I expected my mom to walk into the kitchen, grab the half-used bottle of Windex from the shelf and clean the table.
Formidable Adaptation
Discovering a new sport, learning the language of this sport and its rules, is not easy in the beginning. I have played soccer for fourteen years. I still play, but one day all of that stopped.
Formidable Adaptation Read More »
Three Postcards From Around the World: Travel Narratives from the MQR Readers
For those not familiar, the Theorizing Zombiism Conference invites scholars from all over the world to present academic research related to the subject of the zombie. I was attending to engage in research for a creative thesis of poems that utilized the currently popular Hollywood monster with a long complex Black history.
Three Postcards From Around the World: Travel Narratives from the MQR Readers Read More »
War Has a Life of its Own: A Review of Nouri Al-Jarrah’s A Boat to Lesbos
As time passed and the war in Syria and Iraq continued, I entered its life. I call it ‘life’ because war really does have a life of its own. It is a parallel universe where what goes on has little to do with the minutiae of peace. I wanted to write about this and I did.
War Has a Life of its Own: A Review of Nouri Al-Jarrah’s A Boat to Lesbos Read More »
Carrying Ourselves Across: The Art of Self-Translation, a Community Partnership between 826michigan and the Michigan Quarterly Review
The task was, on the surface, a straightforward one: the student authors and translators, all English-language learners, would chronicle their experiences in one language and transpose them into another. They would carry their stories, as they had done their own bodies, into a context legible to their newly imagined audiences.