MQR Online

A Review of Carol Smallwood’s “In Hubble’s Shadow”

“Simple images, such as the dandelion in the sidewalk crack or ice in lemonade, invite us to compare our own experience and find meaning where there was none before. More complex, but equally intangible experiences can be found in poems like ‘Rearrangements,’ which explores the aftereffects of covert child abuse, although each victim is different.”

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On Writing Michigan: An Interview with Travis Mulhauser

“I think that good writers can create a fully-developed, lived-in physical space for any location and time, and I consider myself lucky that I grew up in–and am able now to write about–a place as physically interesting and beautiful as northern Michigan. As a writer, it’s a great place to hang out in and explore, and as much as anything continues to drive my interest in the landscape.”

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A Joke That Hits You Later: A Review of Natalie Shapero’s “Hard Child”

Think of Shapero instead as a kind of poetic Louis C.K. — the misery is part of the act. Yes, you’re supposed to laugh: “All I have coming in this / world is a joke that hits me later.” And like the best stand-up comedy routines, her poems have solid opening hooks, a finely wrought structure, and a resonance, a truth, beyond what is directly expressed.

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Truth, Sex, and Ego: On Women’s Diaries

The act of keeping a diary has a long history, and a tangled relationship with subjective “truth.” Although diaries have long been associated with women, Margo Culley argues in the essay “I Look at Me: Self as Subject in the Diaries of American Women” that diary-writing was not a feminized form until the second half of the nineteenth century — with the era’s shifting notions of self, the private sphere, and inner life — and again in the feminist 60s and 70s.

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