On May 8th, MR and Amherst Books hosted our 2025 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner Chard deNiord for a reading.
FROM DARK HUMOR about suicide prevention and biased convictions to uncanny animal poems about beetles, birds, crabs, and jellyfish, summer 2025 swings between the real and the surreal, the eerie and the playful, the alive and the dead. janan alexandra’s opening poem, “[tell me what you know about dismemberment],” mourns the slaughter of a palm tree, registering genocide, ecocide, and the brutal removal of an instrument of breath and comfort outside the speaker’s bedroom window. J. Malcolm Garcia offers a moving portrait of Ukrainian refugees in San Diego, weaving together the stories, traumas, and hopes of a people congregated one Sunday afternoon in the city’s Balboa Park. Poems in translation include one by Mimi Hachikai, translated from Japanese; two by Ye Hui, translated from Chinese; and three by Kim Hyesoon, translated from Korean. Carvings by Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich ground the issue, counterbalancing the airy meditations and lines of flight of many other pieces. Prose by Katie Brewer Ball and Joseph Lezza hum with humor, sex, playfulness, and the textures of specific times and places, while a powerful personal testimony by Allen M. Price, “The Rape Closet,” reminds us that queer community can be a site not just of joy and belonging but also violence and abuse. Our public affairs editor, Shailja Patel, had this to say about Price’s essay: “It rings loud and clear as freedom writing.”
Last week, I tore through Dennis James Sweeney’s How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines (New World
Library, 2025), a how-to guide that doubles as a love letter to the dynamic world of literary magazines and small-press publishing. Here’s one quote I’m holding on to in a moment where so much feels like it’s in freefall, a reminder of what literary magazines make possible: “Even a single issue of a literary magazine can be wonderfully varied. Unpublished writers are featured alongside writers with multiple books. Experimental writing appears beside traditional work. Contributors are old and young, published by small and large presses. Literary magazines create space for conversations between writers that might not otherwise find themselves in the same room.” This is a critical moment for magazines like ours. At the time of this writing, the Trump administration has cut over 1,200 grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities while placing 80 percent of its staff on leave; it has targeted pro-Palestinian and Muslim students for detention and deportation; it has made wildly draconian funding cuts to American universities; and it has waged a dizzying number of other assaults on constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech, protest, and expression. In response to new NEA guidelines that grants cannot be used to fund DEI programs or promote “gender ideology,” the Massachusetts Review has taken the Bartleby position. We won’t be applying, and we won’t be cowed.
Britt Rusert
for the editors
When she was 28, Jessica Slice quite literally stumbled into disability while on a hike in Greece with her then-husband. Tired and hot after an hour-long trek, they turned a corner and were confronted by a pack of wild dogs. Though they managed to avoid attack by backing away and scrambling up . . .
“I’m in the call room at the Suicide Prevention Center (SPC) when the phone rings. I hate it when the phone rings. I’ve never had a three-hour shift when it didn’t ring, but sometimes there are long stretches of silence. I pray for those long stretches of silence.”—from Janis Bultman’s “Suicide Prevention,” . . .
Elise Paschen’s latest collection is Blood Wolf Moon, our from Red Hen. Her poem “Heritage” appeared in our A GATHERING OF NATIVE VOICES issue back in 2020. BOA Editions recently published Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, the latest collection from poet Keetje Kuipers, whose poem “I, Too, Took Pictures of My Body” . . .
ALAN GROSTEPHAN is the author of The Banana Wars and Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers.
