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Volume 46, Issue 3

IN KEEPING with our best traditions, this issue contains two essays on Herman Melville, one by our newest editor Thomas L. Durnrn, and the other by Sterling Stuckey, one of our earliest contributors whose work appears in Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan's Black and White in American Culture: An Anthology from the Massachusetts Review, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1969. That questions of race still figure so prominently in the new essays should remind us that however the terms of discourse have evolved over the decades, the funda mental question of America s legacy of the Middle Passage remains unanswered. The "white event" that Tom Dumm mentions may be an encounter with a great albino whale, or it may be coterminous with the nation itself. America itself may be the "white event."

And it is no accident that this issue contains two poems by Brian Turner, the first veteran of the second Iraq War to be published here. For while one eye stares wonderingly at history, the second gazes at what that history has wrought: the continuing prosecution of the "white event" in that place I heard a National Guardsman, veteran of two tours of duty there, refer to as "The Sandbox." I have seen the faces of Americans at the gas pumps moan at rising prices as if they were the spiking temperatures of a fever. But this is no onset of a new infection; rather the debil itating effects of a chronic sickness. As Valerie Martin writes in Property, her great novel of race, "It was the he at the center of everything, the great he we all supported, tended, and worshipped as if our lives depended upon it, as if, should one person ever speak honestly, the world would crack open and send us all tum bling into a flaming pit."

David Lenson
for the editors


Entries

fiction

The Brain Tells Us What Is Real

By Kathleen Halme III

nonfiction

Time to Mow

By Zdravka Evtimova

poetry

You Got a Song, Man

By Martin Espada

nonfiction

Atufal, Aranda's Skeleton, and 'Moby Dick'

By Sterling Stuckey

art

Who Is Ishmael?

By Thomas L. Dumm

nonfiction

Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Bosch); In the Leupold Scope

By Brian Turner

poetry

*

By Simon Perchik

nonfiction

Powers and Principalities

By Stephen O'Connor

poetry

The Mortician: On the Art of Coming to Rest

By Morgan Lucas Schuldt

nonfiction

The Re-vision of Rage: Flannery O'Conner and Me

By Claire Kahane

fiction

Exile's Song

By Bruce Bond

art

Bulletin Board

By Ricardo Pau-Llosa

nonfiction

Presence, Absence

By Emmanuel Boulukos

poetry

Here We Are

By Xochiquetzal Candelaria

nonfiction

Find Your High School Classmates!!!!

By Heather Sellers

fiction

Voluptuary Instruction

By Myrna Stone

poetry

Cities Beneath Them

By Christine Lanoie

art

Education by Windows

By Johnny Lorenz

art

Conceal/Reveal: Passion and Restraint in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

By Kathleen Spivack

poetry

Penultimate Opus

By Jon Kelly Yenser

poetry

Directions to Warsaw, 1984

By Georgia Scott

nonfiction

Cherubs

By Justine Dymond

nonfiction

The Book of Love

By Amy Johnquest

Table of Contents

The Brain Tells Us What Is Real,
Poetry by Kathleen Halme III

Time to Mow, Fiction by Zdravka Evtimova

You Got a Song, Man, Poetry by Martin Espada

Atufal, Aranda's Skeleton, and 'Moby Dick',
Non-Fiction by Sterling Stuckey

Who Is Ishmael?, Non-Fiction by Thomas L. Dumm

Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Bosch); In the
Leupold Scope, Poetry by Brian Turner

*, Poetry by Simon Perchik

Powers and Principalities,
Fiction by Stephen O'Connor

The Mortician: On the Art of Coming to Rest,
Poetry by Morgan Lucas Schuldt

The Re-vision of Rage: Flannery O'Conner and Me,
Non-Fiction by Claire Kahane

Exile's Song, Poetry by Bruce Bond

Bulletin Board, Poetry by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Presence, Absence, Fiction by Emmanuel Boulukos

Here We Are, Poetry by Xochiquetzal Candelaria

Find Your High School Classmates!!!!,
Fiction by Heather Sellers

Voluptuary Instruction, Poetry by Myrna Stone

Cities Beneath Them, Fiction by Christine Lanoie

Education by Windows, Poetry by Johnny Lorenz

Conceal/Reveal: Passion and Restraint in the Work
of Elizabeth Bishop, Non-Fiction by Kathleen Spivack

Penultimate Opus, Poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser

Directions to Warsaw, 1984,
Poetry by Georgia Scott

Cherubs, Fiction by Justine Dymond

The Book of Love, Cover Art by Amy Johnquest
Created Exclusively for 'The Massachusetts Review'

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