A note about the poem from L.A. Johnson for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: After my father died, he was gone but his things were everywhere. Looking around my parents’ house, it was as if he were still alive. His death made the boundaries between the real and the imaginary murkier than ever, and my brain so badly wanted to be tricked—I would see his jacket by the door and think: Oh, he’s come back and this was all a bad dream. That thought would last a moment, then I would realize my mistake and my sorrow would set in again. In grief, the world, as I perceived it, was changed. This poem uses this sense of surreality to explore the domestic space after tragedy.

A note about the poem from Samuel Cheney for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: This poem tracks a culminating series of coincidences. It celebrates the spooky correspondences and recursions the universe sometimes presents to us. The poem turns when the narrator happens upon James Salter’s story “The Destruction of the Goetheanum,” in which the "vast, brooding structure" of the Goetheanum appears as both a photograph and a symbol. A failed writer in Salter’s story is at work on an unfinished novel—“the one great act of his life”––which is also called The Goetheanum. My poem is named in honor of this project.

Note about this poem from Wendy Chen for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: This poem emerged out of my engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous. After reading her texts Dream I Tell You and Hyperdream—from which this poem borrows its title—I was thinking about the relationship between dreams, death, time, and family. At the time, I was trying my hand at keeping a dream journal, and this poem is centered on an actual dream I had after learning about my grandmother's stroke. Dreams for me are often full of emotionally resonant imagery, and I hoped to translate those images onto the page in this poem.

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Note about the poem from Noah Arhm Choi  for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": While gender affirming care has singularly been one of the best things that has happened in my life, it has also meant that going to the Korean spa has no longer become an option with their binary locker rooms and my fears around discomfort and safety. This poem speaks to the ways that I yearn for queerness and Koreanness to be able to exist in the same space, and how even the best things aren't necessarily black or white, all good or all evil. I think this poem, too, is a way to speak to the ways that binary notions of categorization often fail to encompass the fullness of our humanity and our experiences.

Rachel Nelson reads "Diseases of American Slavery (the desire)" for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions".

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Rachel Nelson reads "Diseases of American Slavery (the earth)" for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions".

Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.

Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.

Note from Cindy Juyoung Ok for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": Source text combined and choreographed here includes studies, labels, and idioms.

A note from Amy Sailer for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": I started writing about William and Jane Morris just before getting engaged. Their marriage has given me a rich vocabulary to imagine my own. They built a beautiful home together, Red House, which they intended as an artist’s utopia, where they, their family, and their community of friends could create the home’s medieval-inspired interior decoration, but the experiment fell apart within a few years, in part because Jane fell in love with their friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When I visited Red House, the tour guide called it “a house of indecision.” They had so many unfulfilled projects—I could feel their high expectations and the stress it must have caused them.

I had the opportunity to work on the project at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, where I learned that Morris & Company revolutionized nineteenth-century embroidery. The first half of the century was dominated by Berlin crewel work, a style that employs cross-stitch to fill out predetermined grid patterns. Morris & Company popularized “art embroidery,” a more creative technique, using a variety of stitches to create more organic designs. Both styles of embroidery lead to repetition and redundancy, but to my eyes, repetitive cross-stitches look monotonous and mechanical, while the repetitive patterns in a piece of art embroidery like Jane and Jenny Morris’s “Honeysuckle” look joyful. John Ruskin argues in his essay “The Nature of the Gothic” that redundancy is a sign of pleasure—when we enjoy our work, we keep making more of it. Although we don’t know the names of the women who created so much embroidery, I like to think that redundancy serves as a kind of signature.

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Note about the poem from Melissa Range for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": In the decade I've spent working on my poetry collection Printer's Fist, which is about the abolitionist movement in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, I have dug through archives both digital and physical. One of my areas of investigation has been print culture within the movement, and thus I've done a great deal of research on nineteenth century abolitionist newspapers. Enslavers also used newspapers for their own sinister purposes, of course. The sheer number of "Ran Away from the Subscriber" advertisements in eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers is staggering and sobering. In my research, I looked at many of these advertisements, as well, finding in them important stories of resistance and self-emancipation. There's a great database called Freedom on the Move if you'd like to learn more. I first learned about the girl identified as Juno (most certainly not her real name) from an article by Karen Cook Bell, “Black Women’s Fugitivity in Colonial America,” published on the Black Perspectives section of the African American Intellectual History Society. Using the database Newspapers.com, I was able to find the original runaway ad for Juno, published in the South Carolina Gazette, July 28, 1733. All italicized language in the poem is from this advertisement. Again following Bell’s lead, I consulted the database Slave Voyages for information on the voyages of the slave ship Speaker, captained by Henry Flower. The “place of purchase” for the Speaker’s 1733 voyage is listed in this database as Cabinda, which in the current day is a state in Angola.  I also learned from this same Gazette issue that the Speaker departed, en route to London, two weeks after it had docked in Charleston. The Speaker made additional slaving voyages after this one, according to the Slave Voyages database. While I was working on the poem, it fell somewhat naturally into the form of a mirror poem (I'd been reading a lot of Natasha Trethewey and Adrienne Su, two amazing practitioners of that form). I think the form fits the themes of journeying and reversals that are present in the poem.

Teresa Carmody reads an excerpt from their essay, "Moving the Inconsequential Loop: Somatics, Feminisms", for MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights".