From the Blog

10 Questions for Marissa Davis

January 13, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

This morning, something in my doubt dissolves.
The footprint or the transparency of floors.
The wells open up. Sometimes, the wells close again.
The added materials haven’t allowed the decision anything.
Footsteps must swell, take up bone. The wells must rise.
—from Marissa Davis' translation of Stéphanie Ferrat's "Skyside" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
Technically, one of the first pieces I translated was my own! Before I began translating others’ work, I would sometimes translate my own poems into French and back into English as a combined revision (of the poem) and vocabulary-building (of my French) exercise. I first began...

New Beers Resolutions

January 10, 2025 - By Marsha Bryant

Are you in a beer slump, do you steer
Clear of tastes unlike those you hold dear?
Well, I have a solution:
New Beers Resolutions!
I tried it; there’s nothing to fear.

1.
If you like a clean lager (no frills),
Here’s a beer that might just fit your bill:
For Rebellion Red Lager
Has a touch of swagger
With sweetness and crispness instilled.

2.
Beer for breakfast? Why not go for sweet
Instead of a savory treat?
Cinnamon Bacon Roll
Just might be your beer goal—
Tastes like pastry that’s fresh off the sheet.

3.
If a pourable Reese’s you seek,
Then you’re in for a...

The View From Gaza Launch Event

January 10, 2025 - By Staff

On December 6th, 2024, the Massachusetts Review hosted a launch event for our issue The View from Gaza. The evening included brief notes of welcome from outgoing editor Jim Hicks, incoming editor Britt Rusert, guest editor Michel Moushabeck,...

10 Questions for Michael Lee

January 6, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

There is an old joke I heard one winter,
one popular among the farmers
from Trøndelag to Nord-Norge:

two deer run along the railroad.
One says to the other, we have to get off
these tracks and into the forest.
—from Michael Lee's "Norway's Iron Road," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece of any significance (we’ll leave the middle school poems about elves and such out of this) was a poem called The Taking of Lead, (it would become my first published poem in 2013). I was living in Bergen Norway in 2012 and was very sick with Mono. I couldn’t leave the house and spent every day just reading and writing poems...

On Eavesdropping During the “War”

December 26, 2024 - By Hasheemah Afaneh

These days—the days of the genocide on Palestinians—I go to coffeeshops. Instead of reading a book, I scroll through my phone and witness in real time the death and destruction of Palestinians and Palestine. My people and my homeland. At times, when I hear the word Palestine, I start to eavesdrop.

After the news of the bombing of al-Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip came in, I immediately called off work and went home. Here I was, in a health and academic institution, and there was silence. I wanted to run through the hallways and scream. It was that precise moment, only several weeks into the genocide, that I realized how alone we are as Palestinians.

They’ll think you’ve gone mad, I thought. But aren’t the people who are not...