Shot List
Anne Carson’s poem, “Shot List,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in 2005. We revisit “Shot List” today, in honor of Anne Carson’s birthday.
Poetry
The Pineapple Fields
“The day we left the pineapple fields /Mother cried.”
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Lobita/Otter
Please join Michigan Quarterly Review in celebrating World Otter Day all weekend long, with this poem from our Summer 2016 issue by Natalia Romero. Lobita El lobo blanco se hundió en el agua de color púrpura con la tarde. Una alegría sin sonido más que el desprenderse de algunas matas del arroyo. No volverá. Pero esa
Inevitably, She Declined
In her flesh for half a century, an unhinged sapphire unmarrying.
In honor of what would be Lucie Brock-Broido’s 63rd birthday, we revisit her poem “Inevitably, She Declined,” from our Archives.
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Footprints in the Order of Disappearance
Fady Joudah‘s “Footprints in the Order of Disappearance,” from our Spring 2018 Issue, will be featured in the 2020 Pushcart anthology due out in November. A fever of thyself think of the Earth I call the finding of certain things loss I hold grief close to brace myself for the expected The unexpected
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Persian
after Agha Shahid Ali’s “Arabic” At springtime—Persian new year—we circle around the warmth of bonfires to chant, Give me your color, take back my sickly pallor. There is rebirth in this language. A groom exchanges vows with his Persian bride in a foreign tongue. May their lives be sweetened with sugar, we pray in
Saffron
My mother picks up the pestle and mortar and does to saffron what the clerics have done to her country/ pours in steaming water till the liquid in the bowl becomes the Caspian swallowing the sun/ it smells like a home I have not returned to in 10 years/ saffron/ pound for pound/ the most
At the Same Dead End
Digging through trash, I smell the whiskey on Shamlu’s breath. It’s not so strange. He once stood here recording the rhythm of the butcher’s cleaver like a journalist for Satan’s newspaper. In the ash of lilies and the charred remains of tortured canaries, I open a tin can of dried vegetables, find a beating heart.
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Toward the Image of the Friend
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Reader Michael M. Weinstein introduces Sohrab Sepehri’s poem “Toward the Image of the Friend,” Translated by Franklin Lewis, from our Spring 2019 Issue: Iran. The poems of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980) occupy a special place in the history of Persian poetry, and in the current issue of MQR, which aims to give
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This is Not a Poem About Leah, Let Alone Zilpah and Bilhah
Today we revisit work by 2018 The Laurence Goldstein Prize winner Jasmine V. Bailey. Bailey’s poem “This is Not a Poem About Leah, Let Alone Zilpah and Bilhah,” appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of MQR and was selected by Raymond McDaniel. It’s impossible to disregard the authority in “This Is Not a Poem about Leah, Let Alone
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