Ode on Bees
The summer populations of flying insects/have fallen by more than 80 percent/in the past quarter century. This fact/is a fact I can’t think of very long.
Issues
La Dolce Vita
The camp took place in the bucolic township of Yongpyong, a three-hour bus ride east of Seoul. Twenty professors from top conservatories convened at Alpine Valley Hotel with their flocks of protégés numbering about a hundred in all, predominantly girls. Over the next two weeks, we were to learn from the venerated masters and perform in the concerts held every other evening in the hotel’s grand banquet hall.
Lies, Fame, Memory, Illness, and the Theater of Reza Abdoh
Salar Abdoh’s essay, “Lies, Fame, Memory, Illness, and the Theater of Reza Abdoh,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review‘s Spring 2019 Special Issue on Iran. My brother, Reza, was always pissed off at me, as he often had to bail me out of tough situations. One time, before I stopped going to, or got thrown
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Home and Spectacle
On some days, the news informs me of a school shooting, and I drive blind. My brain fixates on the violence like a new romance.
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Meet our Contributors, MQR Summer 2019 Issue
WILLIAM BREWER is the author of I Know Your Kind, a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Sewanee Review, and other publications. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. FLEDA BROWN’s
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MQR Issue 58:3, Summer 2019
Our Summer 2019 Issue is here! Featuring Essays by Lisa Gruenberg, Ruth Hoberman, Susan Fox Rogers, Jillian Weiss, Daniel Vollaro Fiction by Sarah Kokernot, James Leaf, Kirsten Sundberg Lustrum, Mi-Kyung Shin, Ashley Wurzbacher Poetry by William Brewer, Fleda Brown, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Agustín Lucas, Alain Mabanckou, Circe Maia, Airea D. Matthews, Fabián Severo, Idea Vilariño, Ma Yan Translations by Nancy Naomi Carlson,
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Your Suitcase: Selections from On the Path
Nostalgia doesn’t melt like water underfoot
doesn’t climb on the back of a horse
to be carried far from our hearts
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Displaced Entities, Shattered Identities, and the Loss of Paradise
Immigrants are a special breed. Whether migrating because of political, economic, or other circumstances or simply because of a desire for change, an immigrant is thought to be uprooted from one culture and transplanted into another. However, neither the uprooting nor the transplantation is usually a complete process. For a voluntary immigrant as well as
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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
Sakeen
Sakeen the housemaid was rarely free to play with us, even at parties. She had to prepare dinner, serve it to the guests, and clean up. Shahnaz, my uncle’s wife, liked to throw big parties to outplay our mothers in a game between them known as “The Best Hostess.” Her dinner table was always colorful