On May 8th, MR and Amherst Books hosted our 2025 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner Chard deNiord for a reading.
ONE FATHER in a khaki jumpsuit branded with “Correctional Facility” smiles as he supports his fourteen-year-old’s interest in saving the bees through the telephone. In a prison waiting room, another father liesgently to his six-year-old son that the boy’s mother is not incarcerated at all, but at a “police training academy,” where . . .
I was done up in pale powder and period costume, neatly combed and asked to shave. I look totally different, which was exactly the point. He looks weird, like a ghost. Which is funny. It’s been so long and, especially with this goofy getup, I almost don’t recognize him. —from Eric Boyd’s . . .
Photo by Hossein Zohrevand.“Attack on Gandhi Hospital,” (#15) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. What is unfolding across West Asia is a colonial project that, if allowed to continue, will ultimately pave the way for a Greater Israel and end any prospects for Palestinian freedom. In October 2003, the recently assassinated Ali Khamenei declared . . .
“The Sahara,” articulates Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward in her study of the desert in Arabic verse, “represents a location marked by fear, loss, exile, and emptiness, the result of destruction.” In Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (University of California Press, 2025) Brahim El Guabli argues that this idea . . .
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.
