Hit play below to hear Kate Partridge read her poem “Eve from Above” and scroll down for the full text. “Eve From Above” is featured in MQR’s Summer 2020 issue. Eve From Above Enter dipping close to the mountains, the sheep bouldering their positions along the ridge. As long as you can feel the air pressing against the […]
There’s a world for me to build. I have a chance to do something, even ever so slightly, different from that which is considered known. The outpost, the biological structure, the act of construction and capacity to destruct— worldbuilding, the invocation of something just to the left of the form, becomes an illusory practice.”
Worldbuilding and Meditative Speculation through Solange and Civilization Read More »
Cameron Finch and Yelena Moskovich sit down to discuss conformity, rebellion, post-soviet diaspora, the textures of ideology, writing queer desire, the trauma of flight, and much more.
“Eyebrows Like Her Name”: An Interview with Yelena Moskovich Read More »
Next morning, the kitchen is
still flooded. I drive Michelle to the factory
where she assembles sprinklers all day. The streets
are dark, and the rain is still pouring down.
Monologue While Watching the Rain Fall Read More »
“White waves—a bitter dream—my mother’s mother in the lower deck—wet and cold in the blue-black night.
Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, before she knew of white men or the sea.
A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree and touches wine with her hands. A feast prepared. The gods must have a hand in this! A young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands with old friends in new finery, her buba and iro an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree.
Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America; she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria won’t go unless I come along. White waves in the blue-black sea till we land in port.”
From the Diary of Sally Hemings Read More »
What I’d read him was nothing more than nonsense put to paper in my free time, sheltering my hope that life would not always be what it had been until now, a good life in the dullest sense of goodness.
Story That Kills You Read More »
“The “eternity” that Barot’s speaker is thinking about, which is one of the main focal points of the
collection, is one that actually undertakes the work of fantasy, imagination, and memory.”
What does Eternity Look Like: A Review of Barot’s The Galleons Read More »
Silence is really the language of perpetrators; they tell victims, especially young children, not to say anything or else. I for one am done with silence.
Writing Silences: An Interview with Jeni McFarland Read More »
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Reader Matthew Wamser introduces Glen Hirshberg’s “Over” from our Summer 2020 Issue. A warning: It is so easy to fall in love with the father in this story. In the narrator’s hands, the father comes alive as a truly specific character who couldn’t possibly be anyone other than himself. As
somehow a crop of possibilities I won’t gather,
because my attention’s owed to other pastures,
tilling the sounds below for sense, just as now
Reading Szymborska Under a Harvest Moon Read More »
