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10 Questions for Ryan Choi

August 12, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

As the sharpened sword beheads the two-headed
               serpent,
I shun the crude laughter and gossip of the mortal
               world.
Thousands of autumns of virtue and vice are buried
               in the yellow of the earth,
Under the sunny skies that forever shine on good
               and evil the same.
The slightest breeze rumples the moon’s portrait on
               the lake,
The faintest drizzle snatches the blooming flowers
               from their branches.
...

Restoring the Radical Imagination: Shatz v. Harris

August 9, 2024 - By Kerry Sinanan

I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
From the root of the old one
A new one has sprung

                  Epilogue, Grace Nichols

(Please donate to the Grenada Disaster Fund)

Caribbean hybrid identities are characterized by survival and creativity out of monumental loss, including various languages from Arawakan, to...

July 2024 Contributor Publications

August 6, 2024 - By staff

A Map of My Want is the new poetry collection by Faylita Hicks, published by Haymarket Books. Hicks' was published in our Winter 2023 Special Issue, Woman:Revisited.

J...

10 Questions for Will Howard

August 5, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

We always wanted to have a bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar and call it “The 67”
and fill it with album covers
from that oh-so-glorious year
for western pop music,
call it “The 67” and put it on an enormous sign
next to Warhol’s banana.
—from Pablo Texón's "The 67," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I was in high school, I translated an excerpt of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus in an English class. I’m sure my translation was awful, but I enjoyed the part of the assignment where we had to write a one-page reflection on the...

James Baldwin's Presence

August 2, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

Many are the privileges and rewards that come from being an editor. All the more true when you’ve been called into service for a magazine with a storied and lengthy history like the Massachusetts Review. Despite fifteen years in the trenches, I only recently became aware of a conference that had taken place at UMass on April 22-23, 1988, the spring after James Baldwin had passed. His colleagues here had planned a symposium for that semester: they wanted to celebrate having Baldwin together in Amherst with their former colleague, Chinua Achebe, who had been back in Nigeria in recent years.  When Baldwin died that planned symposium became impossible, and the meeting was instead reconceived as a collective tribute to the man, a more formal (and no doubt less hurried)...