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Massachusetts Reviews: Sadakichi Hartmann, Collected Poems, 1886-1944

December 14, 2018 - By Edward Moran

SADAKICHI HARTMANN: COLLECTED POEMS, 1886-1944, edited by Floyd Cheung, Little Island Press, 2017.

Despite approving nods from Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Karl Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944) remains one of the most eccentric—some say, dilettantish—figures in American literature. In that crepuscular, liminal era between Victorianism and Modernism, Hartmann held court as the quintessential jack-of-all-trades: a poet, a playwright, an art critic, a pioneering photography critic, a newspaper reporter, a proto-beatnik/hippie (he was crowned King of the Bohemians in Greenwich Village exactly a century ago), silent-film extra (he appeared as the...

Massachusetts Reviews: A Partisan Review

November 16, 2018 - By David DeGusta

Accomplice to Memory, by Q. M. Zhang (Kaya Press, 2017)

Editor’s Note: Given that this magazine was the first to publish pages from Zhang’s book, and that, since that time, the author has herself joined our masthead as fiction and nonfiction editor, this magazine certainly can make no pretense to absolute objectivity in her regard. We know what we like, and we think it’s our job to convince you to share our tastes. That said, we’re also happy that David DeGusta shares our enthusiasm.

Reading studies of human memory is a profoundly unsettling experience. We are all, it turns out, unreliable narrators. Our eyes are not cameras—filtering and...

Kempowski Sounds Out the Second World War

August 6, 2018 - By Nil Santiáñez

I am posting this blog entry on 6 August 2018. At 8:15 a.m. local time, exactly seventy-three years ago, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This is a fact. In three days we are going to commemorate the seventy-third anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki—yet another fact. There are many other indisputable facts about the Second World War: the German invasion of Poland, the siege of Leningrad, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allied landing in Normandy, the Warsaw uprising, the Battle of the Ardennes, and so on. And yet, in order to make sense of such facts, one must put them together within a narrative. And as soon as we attempt to do that, problems arise. The most basic of those problems could be...

Massachusetts Reviews: Uncertain Glory

December 22, 2017 - By Leslie J. Harkema

Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales, translated by Peter Bush
(NYRB Classics, 2017)

Joan Sales’s Incerta glòria is a novel about precariousness. Its account of the Spanish Civil War, refracted in the experience of various characters living in Barcelona and on the Aragonese front...

Massachusetts Reviews: Girl, World

November 2, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan

Girl, World by Alex Poppe (Laughing Fire Press, 2017)

For better or for worse, “feminism” is in fashion. Spunky shirts proclaiming feminist slogans have become mass-market staples, allowing anyone (who can afford it) to “try on” feminism in a dressing room. Celebrity feminists tweet one-line proclamations to show their support of the movement—while generally directing their activism toward a palatable, majority-defined “woman”: often white, often cis-gendered, often able-bodied, often American. This sleek, whitewashed, marketable version of feminism is having its heyday while—beyond the...