From the Blog

10 Questions for Alison Prine

November 18, 2019 - By Catherine Fox

I know you less and less,
but forgive your miscalculations,

the distances you thought you might travel,
and your desire to be good.

Time grows between us
With a mechanical agency. —From “To My Younger Self,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was nine years old I wrote a poem for a girl I was in love with. The poem was concerned with war, poverty and finding solace in connection. I don’t know that I have written another poem with such a sweeping scope since. But the gist of the poem ¾ reaching from the awful toward the beautiful, is still at the core of my work.

What writer(s) or works have influenced...

10 Questions for Zachary Frank

November 13, 2019 - By Catherine Fox

"I came back warm from a long winter run to find my daughter on the couch, feet raised, arm wrapped in a wet towel, a glass of chocolate milk on the end table where her father’s ashes used to be."—from “Dark Smoke Rose,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I’ll let it speak for itself (and for how I ugly I found the world in the third grade):

The Stunningly Ugly Witch and the Repulsive Pheasant

One day on Halloween night a stunningly ugly witch flew on a broomstick to a graveyard. She put out a bubbling cauldron and said “itchky...

Waging Peace in Memory

November 11, 2019 - By Jason A. Higgins

One hundred and one years since the end of the First World War, militarism still pervades American culture, and our collective amnesia about our own history puts the world at great risk. In 1973, the year American forces pulled out of Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about the end of WWI:

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day...

Massachusetts Reviews: Odes to Lithium

November 8, 2019 - By Allison Bird Treacy

Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books, 2019)

There’s something apt about the fact that Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium arrived in the world in 2019. That’s because this year is the 25^th anniversary of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark book, Prozac Nation, while Kay Redfield Jamison and Annie G. Rogers, psychologists who both blurb Erlichman’s collection, published their books documenting personal experiences of mental illness a year later in 1995. Now, a quarter of a century on, Erlichman’s odes bring a new kind of wonder to our conversations about mental illness, a tenderness not just towards the self, but...

10 Questions for Lauren K. Watel

November 6, 2019 - By Emily Wojcik

But her features were falling off her face and her lap was sliding off her legs and her voice shifted, as if the ground were dropping away, and she slipped inside her skin a little, as if the mask were too big, and the air rippled with voices and the clatter of clean plates and the clink of glasses, To your health! . . . from “But her feelings,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019)
 

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In college I took a playwriting class and wrote a really goofy piece about a farmer who fell in love with one of his chickens.  I have no idea where that came from—really, I shudder to think.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Unfortunately...