On May 8th, MR and Amherst Books hosted our 2025 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner Chard deNiord for a reading.
SPRING 2026 ISN’T AN EASY READ, but given the times in which we are living, it shouldn’t be. Regarding “The First Spring,” Emma De Lisle’s speaker opens, “It hurt,” while Jacques J. Rancourt’s “Five Wounds” concludes, “I let that hurt suspend me.” The Marxist philosopher, literary critic, and beloved teacher Fredric Jameson, who departed this world a little over a year ago, said that “history is what hurts.” Here, Charlie Clark’s speaker adds: “Hurt is hard and does not translate well / But let me try.”
If this is an issue that heralds spring, it understands that beginnings can only be midwifed—painfully, haltingly, sometimes glacially slow— from deep and honest reckonings with loss. It also reckons with how— from beloved authors to loved ones taken too soon—the dead never truly leave us. Hassan Herzallah’s on-the-ground report from Palestine shares how people insist on sanctifying bonds of love amid an ongoing genocide and a fictional ceasefire while a short story by L. F. Khouri registers the interpersonal violence of settler colonial ideologies and Zionist masculinities in places that may seem far from Palestine but are central to imperialism’s global death cult. A moving personal narrative by Valeria Belardelli reflects on the loss of one of her twin daughters during birth, a reminder that gestation and birth can also beget devastating losses. Artist Jennifer Strings’s gorgeously morbid interiors and haunting embodiments are a fitting frame for this issue’s collective grieving for both the dead and the living.
While war, genocide, and crony capitalism rage outside, the contributions to this issue refuse the divide between the public and private, showing how man-made catastrophes shape our most intimate realities. But the good news is that if it’s true that structural violence goes all the way down, affecting us even at a cellular level, then this is also a profound opportunity. Even a poem can be an opening. Take Lucille Clifton’s “The Lost Baby Poem,” published in MR in 1971, a humble, three-stanza elegy for a baby who could not be because of the way the world was, and is: “you would have been born into winter / in the year of the disconnected gas /and no car.” The poem closes with this lamentation and promise: “if I am ever less than a mountain / for your definite brothers and sisters / let the rivers pour over my head / let the sea take me for a spiller / of seas let black men call me stranger / always for your never named sake.” Clifton’s “The Lost Baby Poem” is one of many abortion poems written by Black women poets in pre-Roe America, including Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother” (“you remember the children you got that you did not get”) and, decades earlier, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Black Woman” (“Do not knock at my door, little child / I cannot let you in”). Looking back at these works from the vantage of a now post-Roe America is nothing short of surreal. Our only way forward may be to look back, tenderly and bravely, and to join hands with the ghosts, the ancestors, the stillborn, and the “never named sake[d]” that Clifton memorializes in her poem.
Britt Rusert
for the editors
Recently, I joined a group of volunteers who write to immigrant detainees in Otay Mesa Detention Center. A quiet kind of connection that forms when I write to someone I may never meet—someone whose world has been reduced to walls, routines, and long stretches of waiting. Writing to detainees is, on the . . .
A review of We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers (New Directions, June 2025) We Are Green and Trembling (2025), Robin Myers’s award-winning English translation of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest novel Las niñas del naranjel (2023) has already received significant international recognition, winning the 2025 National . . .
One morning, as I sat on the beach near the displacement camp where I live, I was scrolling through my phone when I came across a post about my city, Rafah. It was written in the past tense, as if the city no longer existed. I reached into my bag and touched . . .
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.
