MQR Sound

A note about the work "I Can Imagine It for Us" from Mai Serhan:

I wrote this memoir to understand myself as a Palestinian who’s never been to Palestine and who is denied the right of return. By narrating an absence, I hoped to make Palestine tangible to myself; to resist erasure and to find a way to return, even if only through memory and imagination.  

I’m a second-generation Palestinian in the diaspora, born and acculturated elsewhere. I rarely saw myself reflected in literature. I never threw a rock at a tank nor harvested olives, or held the key to an ancestral home. My markers were different: airports, time zones and international calling codes were what connected me to my Palestinian family. My geography is fragmented, and I wanted to bring my dislocation to the page, to bear witness and place my testimony on record.

I also knew there was a story here that hadn’t been told. As far as I know, no narratives follow a Palestinian in China, where the main plot unfolds. Setting the story there pushed the theme of alienation to an extreme and allowed me to explore inheritance, severance and erasure in ways that closely reflected the story I wanted to tell.

But I wrote it for another reason too: to feel less alone. There are more than seven million Palestinians in the diaspora whose lives echo this distance and fragmentation. Someone once said that a good story is like a handshake across the ocean. I wanted to extend my hand, to make others feel seen and to invite them to imagine alongside me.

A note about the work "Talismans" from Marcela Sulak for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: I had been reading the poetry of Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), the Syrian poet, and one day came upon a passionate and beautiful poem called "Talismans," which describes a yearning for love.  Its warmth and quotidian language, its organic materials, invited me to imagine married love in which the wife responds to the joys and challenges of living with her husband through the language of talismans. 

A note about the work "There were no poets of motherhood," from Leah Falk for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: Motherhood has animated my poems since I became pregnant with my first daughter in 2019, but in this poem I return to a memory from before I had children, when motherhood was still an abstraction. After graduating from college, I worked in a bookstore near a prestigious university, and it was there that a well-known scholar and critic contended that there were “no poets of motherhood.” The claim seemed absurd to me even then, since I had been reading contemporary poets like Kim Addonizio, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Zucker, and so many others who use their motherhood as a touchstone. My memory of her talk was among the first in which I realized that I could have an opinion that differed from someone so senior, and have evidence for it, too. In this poem I explore the imagined boundaries some might erect between scholarly and artistic pursuits and domestic and menial work, and what the cost of such borders might be to both art and labor.

A note about the work "Sun Theater Sonnets" (Stanzas 5-7) from Deema Shehabi for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: I wrote this poem as an exploration of how daughters are perpetual placeholders for their mothers even after a mother’s death. This is manifested as inheriting the mother’s memories as one’s own, which can be enriching yet challenging due to the lack of differentiation that can occur. It took me years to understand my memories as distinct from hers. What remains, however, is nature’s solace as a backdrop for memories, both hers and, in turn, mine. 

A note about the work “War is always silent until it's done” from Ezza Ahmed for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 Issue: Warsan Shire has a brilliant poem called “War Poem” and in the second stanza there’s imagery of war giving birth to another war. With that sentiment in mind, I was looking at the exit strategies from the stories of my loved ones and that’s how this poem began to take shape. I have a fascination with looking at the things they packed with them, items they thought they could not live without or wouldn’t find anywhere else. I wanted to see what items they treated as “ingredients” for a fresh start. Though, what I found most interesting was that in all the accounts that were shared with me, what you want to exit from always weasels its way in.

A note about the work "Foreshadow Work" from Anni Liu for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 issue: I was finally able to access effective therapy last year, and that has meant engaging in “shadow work,” or integrating the parts of the self that have been hidden or rejected. I realized poetry has always been a site of shadow work for me, foreshadowing the work I would do in therapy, especially around the alienation of having been an alien. Some of the language in the poem is borrowed from therapy, and some of it is punny and playful, which is maybe an homage to Harryette Mullen and especially her incredible book Sleeping with the Dictionary. I was also happily surprised to arrive at the aspirational ending that remixes the famous line attributed to Terence.

A note about the work "It's safe to say" from Sanjana Bijlani for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 issue: I wrote the first draft of this poem in the morning, a time when I
feel most able to connect with the dreamscape of sleep, the
wistfulness I feel at not being able to stay within it as the day's
routines await. I think I began the poem to try and find language for the experience of missing my beloveds in all their complexity and carrying their histories with me even as each day tasks me to survive its obligations and aggressions. At the heart of the poem is a deep wish, a longing for so much more for us.

A note about the work “The Florist” from Laurie Blauner for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: This is a longer poem than I had previously written. It’s part of a new poetry manuscript and ends the section titled “An Occupation” which includes many different jobs. I had noticed several florist shops in Seattle and imagined working in one. When I wrote the poem it just kept continuing, encompassing more and more.

A note about the work “Ditch and Drain, Fill and Build” from Amy Benson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: I’ve been working on a manuscript about rising seas and the myths about floods that have been told in the past, are being told now, and might be told in the future. I got interested in the relationship between land and water and realized that I knew very little about the “ground” I was standing on in Manhattan, my home for fifteen years. I started researching the history of the land and how it has hardened and expanded over the centuries, and how the fresh water has been drained off, poisoned, and exiled to sewage pipes below ground. Following the water reveals the colonial and capitalist transformation of the island: what starts with foot long oysters in the pre-contact waters around Mannahatta ends with minuscule oysters trying to attach to new human-made reefs in New York Harbor made of waste metal and oyster shells salvaged from restaurants. 

A note about the work “The Ant and the Grasshopper” from Hema Padhu for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: One of my favorite short stories is Trevor William’s A Choice of Butchers, and to some extent, his story inspired me to write this one. I’m drawn to children’s perspectives. I think adults don’t give them enough credit for what they see and understand. A child’s perspective, however, is limited, so I wanted to take this story into Divya’s adulthood to give the narrator some retrospective understanding of her mother’s decision. I love short stories that work with time. It can give a story an expansive, novelistic feel. I wanted to play with time here to trace the life trajectory of these two very different women. The struggles of one generation inevitably echo in the choices made by the next. In both Divya and Selvi’s lives, some choices were made consciously, some they had no control over, but throughout the story, both stay true to their nature. I did not want a big epiphany ending. Life rarely works that way.