A note about the poem “on hunger” from Diya Abbas for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: Chiasmus is the grammatical technique of inversion. This poem uses chiasmus, or concatenation, to create entrapment for the speaker, the subject, and the reader. I wrote this poem because I was frustrated with time. I hoped this technique would build a contamination of belief where sound, the repetition of words and their meanings, could weave the unknown and known. Truth or what Louise Glück calls “embodied vision” is most often found first in the excavation of sound: In the aural knots of the image. Each ligature of the line breaks builds an unbreakable machine of the poem. I want my poems to be concerned with the illumination of vision that makes alternative forms of time possible including the very form of our lives. What poetry offers us is the chance to practice embodied inquiry with intensity and intention. I hope that this poem, through presence, can dance with dignity through form to confront the dilemma of time.

A note about the work “Excerpts from Skyside” from Stéphanie Ferrat translated by Marissa Davis for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Fall 2024 Translation Issue: I stumbled upon Skyside at a poetry fair in Paris several years ago, and it captivated me from the first page. As a painter as well as a poet, Ferrat imbues her work with meditations on the creative process, touching on both the miracles and the banalities (and the miracles within the banalities) of artmaking. Her language is often tinged with the surrealist, leaping from subject to subject in a kind of textual collage--a challenge, but also a thrill, for me as a translator. Skyside's fearless experimentation, philosophical contemplation, and camaraderie with the natural world sing to me with every read. 

A note about the work "The Easy Part" from Ismael Ramos for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Fall 2024 Translation Issue:

Who would want to marry a secondary character?” I found myself wondering one day, as I walked along the river near my parent’s house. The truth is, there were other questions lurking beneath that one. In the era of social media, are we able to generate endless expectations beyond failure? In times of economic precarity, what is a home? Is sharing an apartment really a remedy against solitude? Is it possible to have your own name and personality when your life doesn’t square with the story you’ve created for yourself? Can you write a novel with a squashed identity? Do you have to write to be a writer?

Marcos, the protagonist of 'The Easy Part,' is simultaneously odious and tender. He embodies the sort of secondary character no one would want to be. Far from moving along the main storyline, of being solid and attractive (but not in excess), Marcos is a constant reminder that the possibility that nothing will go the way we want is the substance our days are made of. The true heartbeat of his unwritten novel is the disenchantment of the working class in a historical moment when the internet provides daily reminds of what we could be and aren’t. This story is that rock in the shoe.

A note about the work “Mother of Stone” from Terry Ann Thaxton for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: 

I have a photograph of my parents standing next to each other, leaning against our station wagon on one of our numerous and regular camping trips. My father is shirtless, smiling and wearing his bucket hat. My mother is not smiling. I sensed that my parents did not like each other. They did not touch each other. I did not know until years after their deaths many of the reasons their distrust, but my childhood sense was correct. My parents loved their children, but the pretense of their happiness loomed over our lives and haunted me. It seemed to be my father’s mission to take us to every fort in Florida, including Fort Pickens and Castillo de San Marcos. My father stole a brick from Geronimo’s cell at Fort Pickens by putting it on his head under his hat, which he later used when he built the fireplace in our home. Coquina shells were used in the construction of Castillo de San Marcos. Florida sits on limestone. My mother would occasionally smile but only when my father was not present, and her smile seemed, to me, to be behind a wall of stone.

A note about the work “Archival” from Patrycja Humienik for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue:

I wrote this poem (part of my forthcoming book, We Contain Landscapes), in response to Diana Al-Hadid’s exhibit “Archive of Longings” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA in 2021. I was invited to create a workshop in conversation with the work, for which I led participants in movement and writing experiments engaging page and body as archive. Al-Hadid wrote, in the label for one of her sculptures, “I wondered how much of myself I could lose and still be there.” I remain riveted by the question. 

A note about the work “So Like a Waking” from Peter E. Murphy for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue:

1. Eight years and almost fifty drafts, writing "So Like a Waking" was a pain in the ass.

2. I couldn’t . . . wouldn’t accept that I was an alcoholic. Bums shitting themselves on a park bench or in the gutter, they were alcoholics, not me. Sure, I woke up on a park bench . . . I woke up in a gutter, but I only peed myself.

3. Drinking was the only thing that made sense to me. Make that poetry and drinking. I loved them both equally. However, drinking was trying to kill me. Poetry was trying to keep me alive.

4. At a writing retreat I led in Spain several years ago, a woman who had just lost her mother said, “I’m sorry. She’s all I can write about.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “My mother died sixty years ago, and she’s all I can write about.”

5. I think of my high school years as Early-Derelict Period. I trudged from bookstore to bookstore in Greenwich Village, brown-bagging a quart of Ballantine Ale, searching for Ginsberg’s Howl one week, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind the next. Then I graduated to Mid-Derelict Period. Then Late-Derelict Period when I hit the proverbial rock bottom in a flophouse in Wales.

6. “Hi! My name is Peter, and I’m . . . um . . . well . . . you know . . . .”

A note about the work “Ideal Customers” from Charlie Sorrenson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: Never was fashion more fraught for me than in the early days of transition. Clothing stores became a site of both potential power (here was the quickest and most effective means of signaling to the world how I wanted to be perceived) and acute discomfort. I wanted to explore this tension via the setting of a clothing store catering to transmascs, in the days before online shopping allowed us to experiment and make mistakes from the safety of our bedrooms. And I wanted to place into this environment someone wrestling with how they can and ought to express their own gender. What rules—of gender, of consumption, of service—govern our behavior? When we break them, what else is threatened?

A note about the work “In Defense of Aunt Léonie” from Jodie Noel Vinson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 YEAR issue: If you knew me in my early twenties, we probably had a conversation about Proust. I spent nine months consumed by his novel In Search of Lost Time, which can sound snobbish or academic but for me was an immersive, intimate relationship, a beautiful secret I shared with others passionate about his prose, or who also harbored an obsession with the past. When I turned forty, I returned to Proust. I was at that time also returning to myself after living with chronic illness for three years. His book still had its hold on me, but I was noticing new things. This time around, my way into the novel was through the character of Léonie Octave. Like others, I had, on a first read, taken the aunt to be a comical hypochondriac, obsessed with her own suffering. Now, prone and pitiful on her sickbed, she appealed to my sympathy. What would happen, I wondered, if we were to take her complaints seriously: to start from a place of belief, rather than doubt? Where did that immediate impulse to disbelieve another person’s pain come from? These questions led me to read her character through a lens of compassion, humanity, and empathy, and, eventually, to write “In Defense of Aunt Léonie.”

A note about the work “Once I Was Beautiful Now I Am Myself” from Leila Chatti for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: First, the poem’s title is a line borrowed from an Anne Sexton poem. I wrote this poem in a period when I thought I wasn’t writing; rather, I felt I was reacting, or perhaps channeling. I was at a point in my life where I felt both very sad and very powerless. Because I felt I had little control over my life, I became accustomed to letting myself be carried along, and then I began to write that way—carried on a current of the subconscious. This felt strangely freeing. I was turning into someone I didn’t recognize, in those years, or maybe, more truthfully, into someone I didn’t want to recognize. The self I’d been avoiding, the uglier parts in all this disruption dislodged and brought to the surface. This poem arose from the mix of wonder and horror I experienced trying to really look at myself, without looking away.

A note about "It's Important I Remember that the Enemy Is Always Within” from Cortney Lamar Charleston for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: In ways established by historical precedent, the United States of America is an empire, but I speculate most Americans disagree. Empire has an appropriately negative connotation—a system of domination and exploitation spearheaded by tyrants—and thus feels an unfair description of the America in its citizenry’s imagination: the nation that toppled fascism and saved the free world, the longest-standing democracy on Earth. Yet that very America maintains military outposts around the globe; holds foreign countries as “territories”; has built itself into a military and economic superpower while squatting on the ancestral lands of Indigenous nations. My poem, “It’s Important I Remember That the Enemy Is Always Within—,” buckles under these truths, even as it orbits the death of a brutal, criminal man behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks: Osama bin Laden. Undoubtedly, America (meaning the state) and bin Laden were enemies to one another, but what was bin Laden to an ordinary American citizen? An enemy, certainly, though more a conceptual entity than an actual person, a grainy face and voice to slot into our psyche and induce acceptance of violence and dispossession. Enemies are easily made—thus easily replaced—because of our empathic deficiencies. U.S. forces killed bin Laden in 2011, celebrated across the country as justice served, yet our occupation continued another decade. Our soldiers have finally returned and await their next deployment somewhere far away or, perhaps, closer to home: wherever a new enemy is invented that Empire points to as justification for its actions.