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10 Questions for Lee Upton

October 4, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

IN MY EARLY CHILDHOOD, the people I loved most in the world made sure that I saw a silver tree. I remember taking a giant breath and then swallowing the sight of that tree so that it would never leave me. Late-born, with a far older brother and sister, I must have been a small child to be on someone’s shoulders, and the wind must have been blowing so hard that the leaves flickered like metal. – from Ambrosia, our September 2016 Working Title. Read and excerpt or buy on...

10 Questions for Brandon Lewis

September 26, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

My cityborn friend snaps limbs from trees for the bonfire
and hands me their greenness.    Why refuse

this gift of smoke and hissing years of rain?
Every tree is difficult. Take this oak and its burl—such handsome infection

to climb. I am sorry but without Violence it's too late to catch up with them…
Was a societal leg up ever real?
-- from "That Difficulty Increases Desire" which appears in the Spring 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 1).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written

It’s very...

Massachusetts Reviews: Fire the Bastards!

September 22, 2016 - By Gary Amdahl

Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!  (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) was first published by the author, in the author’s magazine newspaper (no caps, and the italics are mine), in 1962.  The text was written on a typewriter (again, no caps, very little in the way of punctuation, extra spaces between sentences) mimeographed, and stapled.  It’s hard to imagine that such a homely production had any currency at all, but it did, with Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson attesting on the back of the DAP edition to its widespread availability in Greenwich Village, in...

10 Question for Caroline Beimford

September 20, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

"It was the air. The temperature and density of it, like it was being compressed around the city. It was the emptiness of the streets and the quiet. It was the time: there was no school, no one wanted lessons, there was nothing to do but read and breathe and try not to sweat through everything I put on. Even the walls sweat. Beads of condensation budding, like sap, from the purple paint."  -- from "Asfixia" which appears in our Spring 2016 issue (Volume 57 Issue 1).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written

The first real story I ever wrote was for a class with Suzanne Berne at...

Massachusetts Reviews: The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues

September 14, 2016 - By Jeff Diteman

The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues (Drunken Boat Media, 2015),

While the conventional approach to poetic production is additive, involving the careful placement of words on the void of the blank page, erasure poetry is subtractive, starting with an existing text and deleting material until only a poem remains. The source texts for such a procedure can be anything--another poem, an ancient codex, a corporate annual report, a scientific study, a newspaper article--any document that the poet thinks can be...