MQR Sound

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.

A note about the poem “For Girls Who Talk Too Much at Lunch” from Steffi Sin for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: My poetry collection For the Ones Who Grew Up In Hong Kong Style Cafés is comprised of twenty-six sonnets, all set in San Francisco Chinatown’s now-closed ABC Café & Restaurant. Each poem is a vignette of a meal the narrator experiences, and the use of Anglicized Cantonese represents the fluidity of language for bilingual speakers, playing with Cantonese-English rhymes and homophones. “For Girls Who Talk Too Much at Lunch” is about the disconnect between the narrator, who is trying to comprehend the violent history of Chinese in America she’s learned in school, and her immigrant father, who doesn’t have the mental capacity to discuss these issues because he’s preoccupied with the family’s financial struggles. The poem is titled as a commentary about the double-standard for daughters. Oftentimes, when women speak up, the people around them don’t listen, and their words are dismissed as drivel, as foolish, and they’re told they’re disconnected from reality. Education is perceived as a road to success, towards the illusion of the American Dream, but when women use their education to question the norm, education then becomes an instrument spoiling their minds. The lines that break from the established rhyme scheme then represents the narrator’s persistence in challenging these constraints.

A note about the short story “Diaspora Café” from Vince Omni for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I spend a lot of time in coffee shops, or at least in the genre of coffee shops that has come to characterize American culture: big, busy, expensive. They are great places for working and for people watching. They are also, by and large, very homogeneous. “The Diaspora Café” is my humble attempt to remake that genre from a Black perspective in my hometown of Denver, CO, where rampant gentrification has displaced black and brown people.

A note about the poem “13 Ways of Nepantla” from Fernando Trujillo for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I had been reading Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, and I kept finding myself back at “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which was in his first collection. I was struck by the austerity of the poem, in contrast to other works by Stevens. And I kept returning to the second canto, “I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.” I thought of myself and my community, how so many of us are of two, or even three minds, within the same tree, so to speak. We have our indigenous mind, our Caucasian mind, and our mestizo mind, cutting across both México and the US for me and many in my community. This also, linguistically, applies to my poetic lineage; Neruda en español inspired me as much as Whitman in English as a teenager, Dickinson as much as Lorca. This all contributed to my mindset when I started writing “13 Ways.” Of course my poem is not as tightly structured or imagistic as Stevens’. I’m writing more from sound than image. I’m also attempting to place myself, my experiences, and my family at the center of a poetic lineage, hence all the grabbing from other poets. All-in-all, what I’m trying to do is imagine myself in the song of “América America,” and more than just imagining, writing a place for myself in it.

Saddiq Dzukogi reads "Bakandamiya XI." from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Glen Retief reads his fiction piece "Ghost Fish" from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Chika Unigwe reads her fiction piece "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" from MQR''s Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.