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The View From Gaza Launch Event

- 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,...


Interviews

10 Questions for Michael Lee

- 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...


Justice for Palestine

On Eavesdropping During the “War”

- 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...


Our America

On White Hysteria

- By Jim Hicks

Editor’s note: A earlier version of this essay was published on December 25, 2019. It has been revised here in light of more recent events.

In her December 2019 preface to a New York magazine photographic portfolio by Mark Peterson, with less than a thousand words Claudia Rankine offered what was, for her, a typically eloquent and essential assessment of the state of our nation.

She began with Dylann Storm Roof, the young assassin that in 2015 killed nine African Americans at prayer in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; she then notes Roof’s ongoing exchange of letters with Billy Roper,...


blog

MR's Blog Is Moving to Substack

- By Staff

As of December 20, 2024, the Massachusetts Review will not able ble to uplaod new blogs onto our website. We are working to get this sorted and resolved before the Spring issue release on March 15, 2025, but we have decided to move our blog and Performance to a new Substack im the meantime. We will return to the website when we csn, but will maintain the Substack as well.

We hope that you will subsccribe to the Substack. All of our content will always remain free, but we are grateful for paid subscriptions, as this will support our writers and artists.  Thank you so much for sticking with MR and for helping us keep publishing important work.

We will be back-posting work from the past couple...


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