From the Blog

10 Questions for M.A. Untch

July 18, 2019 - By Christin Howard

“Stars crept through bedroom windows to feed the dark.
Everybody became a friend that died.
Blitzed desire tiptoed in from all directions.
Wintered, feverish roses bloomed on yellowed sheets.
Not me, thinking back as far as I could– who
            did I touch? How many sheets spilled over my bed…” —From "Better Angels II," Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote:
I wrote a poem “Estate Sale” while visiting relatives in Appomattox, VA. My aunt was having a lawn sale. When I started the poem, I had no idea where I was going with it until...

10 Questions for Alice Friman

July 12, 2019 - By Christin Howard

“But I do wish
we had found the courage to use
those purpled hours and put them
to work: defy decorum and undress.
peel off,disrobe, strip down to the very
bones if necessary.” —From “On the Overnight Train” Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote poems in college. Didn't everyone? Terrible poems of love-longing and seventeen-year-old misery. But the first poem I ever wrote that I worked on and saved I called "Beneath My Heart." I had a friend who was pregnant and I wanted to express, to put into words, the tight clutch of a fetus—that little fist of 3rd month cells, that— well you see, I couldn'...

Night Hands (Working Title 4.1)

July 11, 2019 - By Jen Cross

The Massachusetts Review presents the latest Working Titles e-book: NIGHT HANDS a story by Jen Cross, with an introduction by Elizabeth Harries- available this week!

"As the first rays of sun pierced the night in the surrounding wood, Old Mother Ganz raised the double-headed axe. “Now, my daughter,” said the old witch, “we will give these hands back to the night.” Silence for the pause of a breath, the span of a century, a fragmentary turn of the earth. A shard of sun spliced the top lip of the axe. Gnarled hands tightened about the handle and let the blade fall.

The hands in their pretty boxes, that sweet reckoning of pale yellow skin against velvet against the dark exterior. They stay youthful. They stay...

Massachusetts Reviews: Spectra

July 10, 2019 - By Robert Manaster

Spectra: Poems by Ashley Toliver (Coffee House Press, 2019)

"Kinesis," the first poem in Ashley Toliver's powerful first book Spectra, frames the collection's primary strength: that of movement through trauma and the emotionally dark places in the female self, where one can be "plumbing / a violent kinesis. "This movement takes place via Toliver's poetic form and her charged poetic language. While near the collection's beginning, the female speaker's husband in "Long Division" is waiting for "a woman / to crawl out of / herself," by the collection's last poem, the speaker sees herself "in the last pew / of the lit horizon / in the wide-open field of the...

10 Questions for Robert Carr

July 8, 2019 - By Emma Kemp