Black Ocean is an independent publisher based out of Boston, with satellites in Detroit and Chicago. Known for their experimental and bold aesthetic, Black Ocean celebrates artists who color outside the lines & produce risk-taking literature with a purposeful vitality. Since 2004, the press has produced over 50 full-length poetry collections, including titles such as […]
Tradition The Tradition, Jericho Brown’s first book of poetry since his award winning The New Testament was released in 2014, is nothing short of a transcendent collection. Part ethnography and part odyssey, it explores in three sections, themes of masculinity, sexuality, and race utilizing “tradition;” here a refreshingly multifaceted conceit as a method of delivery.
“A Field of Flowers Called Paintbrushes:” A Review of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition Read More »
MQR is delighted to announce a new project with Wolverine Press, with these words from Press Director Fritz Swanson: _______________________________________________________________________ Wolverine Press is pleased to partner with Michigan Quarterly Review on the first of what we hope will be many collaborative editions. As a sign of our commitment, we’ve bound our two letter marks between
Wolverine Press + Michigan Quarterly Review: A Letterpress Partnership Read More »
Roja Chamankar’s Dying in a Mother Tongue is a poetry collection on the brink of loss, violence, coming into language, adulthood, and emigration. First written in 2009 (in Persian), when Chamankar was about to leave Tehran for France, Dying in a Mother Tongue is first a diegesis of a relationship’s destruction. The poem moves from
“Both a Poem and a Microcosm:” An Interview with Roja Chamankar Read More »
Not only what we read in these global times but how depends on a number of forces. Writers, translators, editors, and publishers, consciously and otherwise, respond to these forces, offering a diet that in part responds to their individual taste while also adjusting to the larger laws of the market. In other words, all literary
A Lover Alone in Prison: A Conversation between Ilan Stavans and Sara Khalili Read More »
Over the weekend of February 15–17, 2019, a symposium of about a dozen scholars convened at the University of Michigan to talk about the changes and challenges facing the field of Iranian Studies forty years after the Revolution of 1978–79. In addition to art, literature, historiography, and anthropology, the topic of cinema and media studies
Iranian Cinema, Then and Now: An Interview with Blake Atwood and Pedram Partovi Read More »
Threatening objects that are suspended or held back; a mysterious door in a vast lake; a pedestrian bridge that leads to nowhere; an ocean trapped in a skewed room; a group of seemingly oblivious swimmers near a giant whirlpool in the sea; crowds of people trapped in uncertain situations; a lone Lego block-like tower in
In her debut novel, The Wild Birds (Rare Bird Books, 2018), author Emily Strelow interrogates what it means to be “wild” by layering the word’s many meanings onto palpable, empathic, and deeply-flawed characters, all who live among the diverse and wondrous environs of the American West. The Wild Birds is told in alternating, non-linear chapters—an appropriate
The Wild Birds: A Review and an Interview with Emily Strelow Read More »
“Movies work,” Hannah Ensor’s speaker posits, “because we’ve forgotten // that even when someone is an antagonist / we’re not supposed to be happy / when they die.”
Somatic Pinging: An Interview with Hannah Ensor Read More »
Early in Michael Earl Craig’s Woods and Clouds Interchangeable, forthcoming from Wave Books, there’s a poem that I would argue serves as key to reading the book—and Craig’s work overall. Specifically, it is the first stanza of “The Rabbit,” the collection’s third poem: I remember the spring when the rabbit with no ears showed up.
