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 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
MQR is delighted to announce a new project with Wolverine Press, with these words from Press Director Fritz Swanson: _______________________________________________________________________ Wolverine Press is pleased to partner with Michigan Quarterly Review on the first of what we hope will be many collaborative editions. As a sign of our commitment, we’ve bound our two letter marks between
Wolverine Press + Michigan Quarterly Review: A Letterpress Partnership Read More »
I must have been about ten when my mother and I were called into a cubicle at the American embassy in India, where we had traveled from Iran as part of our visa application, and in light of the absence of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington. The official, whom I only recall to have
The End of Romanticism in Tehran Read More »
Roja Chamankar’s Dying in a Mother Tongue is a poetry collection on the brink of loss, violence, coming into language, adulthood, and emigration. First written in 2009 (in Persian), when Chamankar was about to leave Tehran for France, Dying in a Mother Tongue is first a diegesis of a relationship’s destruction. The poem moves from
“Both a Poem and a Microcosm:” An Interview with Roja Chamankar Read More »
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
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.
At the Same Dead End Read More »
There are public pools in Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan, no doubt elsewhere in Iran, too, but those are the cities I visited at the end of 2015. Before I left for Khomeini Airport, I had discovered the existence of a Jewish sports center in Tehran, a place to swim where my last name might gain
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Fiction Reader Elinam Agbo introduces Hossein Mortezaeian Abkenar’s story “Second Slice of Darkness,” from our Spring 2019 Issue: Iran. So often, we want stories to immediately declare their secrets. We are as impatient in reading as we are in listening. In “Second Slice of Darkness,” Mehri awaits her
Second Slice of Darkness Read More »
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
Toward the Image of the Friend Read More »
