It is March, and I cannot remember this winter’s first snow, though I am sure I entered its white hive. By now it has been replaced. Weather comes and goes; we enter and exit. Today I have been “out” of weather (indoors), “in” weather (outdoors), back “out” of weather, and so on.
“She Seems A Part of Me”: On Carl Phillips’s “White Dog” Read More »
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren has won the 2014 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, which is awarded annually to the best poet appearing in the journal who has not yet published a book. The award, which is determined by the MQR editors, is in the amount of $500.
2014 Clayton Prize Goes to Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren Read More »
Lately I’ve been obsessing about the liminal spaces between prose and poetry, how one can inform the other, and how—stripping bare the artifices for a second—one is essentially the other.
The Poetry of Prose: A Brief Study of Justin Torres’s “We the Animals” Read More »
Haesong Kwon has won the 2014 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of the best poem or group of poems appearing that year in Michigan Quarterly Review. His poem “Epistle,” appeared in the Fall 2014 issue.
This year’s judge, Khaled Mattawa, writes: Haesong Kwon’s “Epistle” is a minimalist gem that employs a taut Modernist esthetic to tell an American immigrant saga where identity, grief, and the acceptance of change tussle and generate varied emotions. It is a profound telegram/epistle from a poet who has thought hard about the attendant themes of exile and managed to put the best words in the best order.
2014 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize Awarded to Haesong Kwon Read More »
In January, I shared with regular readers of this blog my experience reading as many editions of Moby-Dick as I could get my hands on in a university small town. I found fancy illustrated versions, and even fancier illustrated versions, and modest versions for the 1930s Everyman, and versions that had been subjected to undergraduate scribblings, and even a children’s pop-up version—albeit one so intricately cut and lovely that you would cringe to see a toddler’s hands pulling on its riggings and sails. Each edition different from the next, in its own distinctive way. And yet, they each share one thing in common. None of them know how to speak Hebrew.
The Mysterious Hebrew Whale Read More »
Courtney Sender has won the $1000 Lawrence Foundation Prize for 2014. The prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of MQR to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. Sender’s story “We Can Practice Starts” appeared in the Spring 2014 issue.
2014 Lawrence Foundation Prize Awarded to Courtney Sender Read More »
As evidenced by my previous blog posts, I have been drawn by the predicament of writing race, or writing difference. Without a doubt, I am still bothered by this question of how we, or really, I, want to go about training my work to resonate on numerous levels, without sacrificing honesty for clarity, without having to play the endless game of cultural catch-up for a mixed audience. Without a doubt, this stream of thought turns almost every thing that I read, watch, or otherwise consume into a potential craft lesson. The latest item to fall victim is a documentary that I consider one of my favorite movies: Jiro Dreams Of Sushi.
Found In Translation Read More »
Ideation should always be this concise and rewarding. Many of those maps I have kept and found again and again. They end up, intact, as a bookmark for Flaubert, or at the bottom of my bedside table drawer under loose change and a pocket knife. As urgent as the notes are made, their meaning, for the life of me, has been all but lost. They are still so compelling that one can make a painting directly from them. My own thoughts dial around their archaic symbols and half-words, the key of which had been pantomimed on a cold snowy walk or cupped into a rolled-down car window—If you see this, you will know.
Poiesis: On Drawing Read More »
A few years ago, I was teaching a middle school writing elective at a well-regarded summer camp for the arts. The students in this class were not primarily interested in writing: they were there as young musicians, or dancers, or studying “general arts” which usually meant their well-off parents thought it more edifying for them to draw with charcoal and write poems and create spliced-together musical theater out of the latest pop songs than to let them spend the summer watching TV and lighting matches in the backyard.
I Am What Is Missing: Our Stuff, Ourselves Read More »
Do we remember Diogenes of Sinope? Diogenes—the Greek cynic who famously wandered around holding a lantern up to all the men he passed in the marketplace, asking them, “Hey, are you full of shit?” Yes? We remember this? Good. Because that’s essentially the plot of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Vice Films, 2014), only we’re in “Bad City,” Iran and it’s always nighttime and Diogenes has been recast as a vampire, and she—the titular “Girl” (Sheila Vand)—is dope as hell.
Vampire Vigilante Justice: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night Read More »
