On Not Writing
I had just enough experience working with teenagers to know they’re merciless bullshit detectors. I also remembered how my classmates and I had treated some of our teachers—teachers who would now be my colleagues.
“Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls and Women,” by Carol Gilligan
Today, I explain, they are to be investigative reporters; their assignment is to find how girls and women appear in this museum.
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“Ultima Thule,” by Susan Rich
In this dark moment, the largeness
of which I’d like to deny, we settle
arguments with silence, we divide the terra-cotta
soldiers one eyeball at a time.
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Safe: A Meditation on Charlottesville and Beyond
The public nature of the hate is critical to its Americanizing function. Shouting hate slogans, hateful slurs, is our form of communist denunciation and coerced betrayals of loved ones — only, instead of marking Party membership, by offering up traitors to a cause, capitalists, enemies of state — we signal we are part of the majority by verbalizing hate, demonization, exclusion.
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The Future Every Moment: A Review of Dan Gerber’s “Particles”
With all the weight of future uncertainties — predictions of ever greater social despair, economic collapse, another world war, concerns for the end of natural resources and therefore the wildernesses that sustain all of us — Dan Gerber’s Particles: New and Selected Poems is a deeply human meditation more timely and timeless than could have ever imagined.
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“Alba for Donatila,” by Virgil Suárez
In her clapboard house with hard-packed dirt floors.
In this place of ghostly waking, my grandmother
rises from dark slumber, already dressed, her hair
combed over each ear, held by minnow silver
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“In the Days of Old Things,” by Hananah Zaheer
She had wanted nothing more than to live here. Now, chewed up wads of pink, yellow, and white gum stuck to the walls provided a mountainous landscape for roaches that had taken up residence in all the cracks they could find along the forgotten, once white walls. No one noticed.
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On “Curiouser and Curiouser”: An Interview with Nicholas Delbanco
“Music, the visual arts, and, predominantly, the writing of books have all been enduring interests, and the arrangement of these essays — long, brief, long, brief, long — is meant to mirror those concerns.”
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From the Editor: Introduction to MQR 56:2
Introduction by Jonathan Freedman from our Spring 2017 issue.
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“On Losing a House,” by Mary Oliver
We never saw
such a beautiful house,
though it dipped toward the sea,
though it shook and creaked,
though it said to the rain: come in!
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