MQR Sound

A note about the work “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 “My Left Hand, Unholy” from Sanjana Thakur for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: I took a poetry seminar on descriptive writing in the first year of my MFA. One of our assignments was to choose an object in our home and write a half-page of visual description about it. I chose a red onion. A year and a half later, I wrote "My Left Hand, Unholy" for a fiction workshop, constructing the story around that red onion and one line: "Death is a woman's duty." I tend to be a somewhat frantic, deadline-motivated writer, so this whole story was written by pulling two all-nighters two days before it was due, and while I did revise it after receiving feedback from my professors and peers, it didn't substantially change form. The hardest thing to pin down in this story was the name! It started out as "Antyesti" which means "Last Sacrifice" (referring to Hindu funeral rites), then became "Life Cycles", then "Bodily Fluids", then "Water of the Womb", and finally, thanks to a classmate's suggestion, "My Left Hand, Unholy". I hope you enjoy it. 

A note about the work "Blue Skies, Birdsong" from Leyla Loued-Khenissi for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue:

Blue Skies, Birdsong recounts a harrowing ordeal Leyla Loued-Khenissi and her family experienced during the 1997 Sierra Leone military coup. Over 24 hours, their home was attacked 16 times by armed rebels and civilians before they escaped to safety. This first-person narrative sheds light on a little-known event in Africa that predates social media. Loued-Khenissi wrote it all down to confront her memories and  ensure the story is remembered. By sharing the story, she can mirror it to others, claiming a sense of reality between her today and her memory to achieve some catharsis and understanding while preserving a page of history that might otherwise fade into obscurity

A note about the work “Insult” from Martín Espada for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: “Insult” is about poet William Carlos Williams, and the drive to survive, even transcend the “insults” of our lives to carry out our work and make our voices heard. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most important poets, receiving the first National Book Award in Poetry in 1950 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. He was also a practicing physician in Rutherford and Paterson, New Jersey for four decades. In August 1952, Williams suffered a massive stroke that left his upper right side paralyzed. (The medical term is an “insult to the brain.”) He retired from medicine and spent two months hospitalized for depression from February to April 1953. His appointment as Consultant to the Library of Congress—today’s Poet Laureate—was revoked after an FBI investigation into false charges that he was a communist. The organizations, affiliations, and publications listed in the poem come from the poet’s declassified FBI file. I also quote a May 1953 postcard sent by Williams to Swarthmore College in search of a reading, typed with one good eye and the “wrong” hand. Williams would go on to produce some of his major work in the 1950s, including, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” where he wrote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” The postcard generated my poem, but so, too, did conversations and emails with friend and Williams biographer Paul Mariani.

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 . . . .”