Each week I pried stones from the frog, ran hands over fetlocks.
Gold palomino, black morgan, a huff and a cirrus
of steam. Winter mornings light
muscled its way through the whitewashed boards.
“Boys of My Youth,” by Charlotte Boulay Read More »
When it was spring, we
pulled crawdads and salamanders
out of creek beds we dammed
with rocks and leaves,
thick as the swallow’s nest
in the corner of the shed.
“Nocturne,” by Madison Jones Read More »
I want to think about distance and Jane Gregory’s new book of poems, Yeah No. Or something more like gapping. A space between concepts charged with those concepts’ distance, what holds discourse together (and molecules, and planets).
Notes toward Jane Gregory’s “Yeah No” Read More »
As a toddler, I devoured reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and even in the 1970s still occasionally saw the civil defense film Duck and Cover. It was an everyday occurrence to see the yellow and black signs marking the way to the nearest fallout shelter in schools, post offices, and stores. There was no escaping the Cold War’s shadow.
Through a Russian Lens Read More »
The facts I gradually discovered about the human survivors who feed us all have an element of surprise, tinged with wariness about the future. What might once have seemed alien in their way of being came to seem special, all too rare, precious, endangered.
“The One Who Feeds Us All,” by Margaret Morganroth Gullette Read More »
“I really want the resources and the money that’s coming into the city to reach the bus, but I hope that gentrification never reaches the bus because there’s just so much culture and originality there.”
Riding with Aunt DDot: An Interview with Detroit Artist Bree Gant Read More »
Van Den Berg gives loveliness to the gruesome while opening up the novel’s world to all kinds of ghosts. The real emotional power of the novel, however, beyond the elegance of its language and the precision and momentum of its telling, builds from what ends up being a brutal moment of confrontation.
A Review of Laura Van Den Berg’s “The Third Hotel” Read More »
Two thousand years after her people left Jerusalem and eighty years after they left Turkey and fifty years after they left Poland and twenty-​nine years after the death of her daughter, the woman walks down the desert road and she feels her body letting go of her.
“High Desert,” by Ramona Ausubel Read More »
The thing about identity is, people are always trying to define who you are for you, to tell you what you mean. And we should be interrogating our positions in society, our privilege relative to our oppression, but we should also be skeptical of those who insist we are definitively one thing or another.
Writing My Way into Jewishness Read More »
Hearty congrats to former MQR intern Elinam Agbo, who was recently awarded a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Congrats to Elinam Agbo Read More »
