Front Cover by Rose B. Simpson
Directed South, 2015. CERAMIC, MIXED & RECLAIMED MEDIA
See Rose B. Simpson's Denver Art Museum performance here.
Order a copy nowWE ARE HONORED to present to you the very first Massachusetts Review issue focused on Native American writing. We are thankful to Associate Editor N. C. Christopher Couch and the rest of the MR team for dreaming up this issue and for asking us to be guest editors, and we are especially thankful to the writers and artists whose work we’ve chosen for this special issue. Their words and images are a gift.
This issue, as it was first imagined, was set to coincide with and push back against Massachusetts’s planned celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower voyage and the settlers’ arrival at Plymouth. Instead of commemorating the settler colonial narrative that surrounds the founding of Plymouth Colony, we sought instead to celebrate Indigenous narratives, not only from the Northeast but also from all of what is now the United States.
This issue emerges in a world much changed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the current...
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The 2019 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Amit Majmudar for his poem, "Invasive Species," published in Volume 59, Issue 4.
Join us for a celebratory reading at Amherst Books on Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m. Free and open to the public.
Amit Majmudar's next books are Soar: A Novel and Kill List: Poems. His most recent book is Godsong: A Verse Translation...
We are thrilled to share the Denver Art Museum's video of their artist-in-residence, Rose B. Simpson, who we were happy to feature in our current special issue, A Gathering of Native Voices (Winter 2020).
“We are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest [...] the teachings of Thoreau are alive today, indeed, they are more alive today than ever before.”
—REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (MR 4.1, Autumn 1962)
Following Fascism from Charlottesville to the Capitol
(Screenshot of a William Fears Facebook post, 12 August 2017. Fears is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for choking his girlfriend. Alex McNabb is co-host of the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah.)
If you’ve never experienced it firsthand, let me assure you: the sight and sound of hundreds of men moving as a unit while loudly chanting the...
I remember flying over the Atlantic Ocean in a plane full of Russian speech and tentative hope, with children craning their necks to catch glimpses of the clouds below. I remember landing at JFK International, after winter had already dropped its early drape of darkness. While we waited for our luggage, massive cars crawled by outside, their lights splashing behind the scratched glass of sliding doors. I remember spending the night at some airport hotel, having a forgettable dinner at the hotel restaurant. What I remember most is darkness, oily and dense, and the airport lights twinkling like tiny distant stars.
This happened mid-January 1977, a week before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. Almost a half year earlier, we had left our home in Odessa, Ukraine and then spent five...
You don't just get to decide to start eatin again, it happens slow,
a groggy crawl and stumble out of a dream.
I didn't choose to starve mysel,
I didn't choose to stop. It was a cycle, my own metamorphosis
—from "'Eating like a Bird, It's Really a Falsity,'" Volume 61, Issue 4 (Winter 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I have found “poems” that I wrote at six years old, specifically one titled “The Rose.” It was—of course—a far cry from what I write now, but is still indicative of how I’ve always used poetry as my best, most natural form of communication. I also recall writing poems during my undergraduate poetry course days...
dá’ák’ehdi
dá’át’ąą yiighaad
yéego dootł’izh
‘iiná yił
Niłtsą́ Bi’áád yiilzhoł
shádi’aah dę́ę́
—from "dá’ák’ehdi (in the cornfield)," Volume 61, Issue 4 (Winter 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I attended a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school from tenth grade until graduation. It was one of those schools that was originally intended to eradicate Indigenous identity, but it changed to a place that celebrated Indigenous personhood and encouraged all students to pursue their ambitions. The BIA held an essay contest and I entered an essay...
(Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, 1778. Joseph Siffred Duplessis. Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Over the last four years or so, events in the United States of America—a country in which, as you know, I myself have no small interest—have made it difficult for those of us who are, shall we say, permanently retired from active duty, to remain so.
The recent controversy regarding a book contract, proffered to a certain notorious abuser of the public good and trust, has made it impossible for me, as a dedicated public servant, to remain silent any longer. On this issue, I long ago made my own sentiments and my own practice, clear, so let me indulge myself here by simply citing from my...
