Electronic dance music is to Detroit what tango is to Buenos Aires, or cumbia to Cartagena— in other words, it’s hard to go more than a few blocks on a Friday night without walking through a low bass rumble and the muffled thump of a kick drum. You could spend years working through the catalogues […]
“My Music is a Happy Accident”: An Interview with Kesswa Read More »
George Abraham’s new chapbook The Specimen’s Apology (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) accomplishes the painfully vital and often deeply violent work of imagining. In claiming two identities made systematically invisible (Palestinian, and queer), Abraham weaves us into worlds from which we are desperate to escape. Much like Elizabeth in the referenced video game Bioshock: Infinite, the Palestinian/queer
Palestine in Queer Time: A Review of George Abraham’s The Specimen’s Apology Read More »
Change is something that many of us strive for—changing ourselves, changing others, and, most particularly, changing the world. But too often we expect radical change without having to put in the work to achieve it; we ignore the arduous tasks that precede major transformation and just continue yearning, searching. Enter Mason Hues, the protagonist of
Sickness Bears Honesty; Honesty Bears Change: Thirty-Seven by Peter Stenson Read More »
At the center of Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s startling, gorgeous, debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree are two voices. One is Chula, only seven years old, a young girl living in a gated community in Bogotá, Colombia, who experiences the conflict of the Escobar years in sounds and colors, in news broadcasts and snippets of
I Wrote This Novel as a Way to Return: An Interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras Read More »
When I Skype-called Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, debut author of Friday Black, we talked about family. We began with the families in his collection, from the father whose writer son drives him into the mystic-bureaucratic maze of “The Hosptial Where,” to the mother who, when the TV goes dark from loss of electricity, says, “Good. Now
Who Cares About You? (Family and Life in Friday Black) Read More »
Anne Stevenson’s review of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters appeared in MQR’s Winter 1999 issue. Our dear friend and longtime former Editor Lawrence Goldstein knows the journal’s publishing history like an intimate library, and he reminded us of this treasure from the archives. In the United Kingdom, Ted Hughes is recognized as an outstanding—even the definitive—English
Wreath for a Bridal Read More »
At the risk of generalizing perhaps too broadly, prose by poets—that is, prose written by writers whose primary mode is poetry—seems to fall into two camps. Either the writing is extremely sober, to clearly differentiate it from the poet’s poetry (think criticism, or op-eds), or poets’ prose reads like poetry. Which is to say it
The Word Wholly Itself: Inger Christensen’s “The Condition of Secrecy” Read More »
Gold Wake Press is an independent literary press, publishing four to six titles per year. To date, the press has produced over forty books of poetry, memoir, and fiction, including titles such as This is Not About Birds, by Nick Ripatrazone, Robinson Alone, by Kathleen Rooney, Local Extinctions, by Mary Quade, and more. In addition to
“One thing that I like about Radio Ambulante is how broad the experiences are, how different they are, and how we can narrate life in these different places, and satisfy our curiosity about the differences between these places. The specificity of the stories we tell I find to be one of the most rewarding parts of the project.”
Latin American Storytelling in the Trump Era: An Interview with Daniel Alarcón Read More »
If Irish poetry could not claim to be fine art before the twentieth century, it is not because there was a lack of Irish poets with talent and voice; rather, it is because the literary world ignored them, or willfully caricaturized them. Though the problem persists, this anthology makes it clear: the work of Irish poets is undeniably diverse, crafted with rigor, and historically urgent.
Complicating the Canon: A Review of “The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol. IV” Read More »
