Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Daniel Byronson

April 1, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

I would have liked to see myself going into the little room at the Café Boscán enraged and pistol in hand looking for his face facing some other face among the tables. He spoke wet, moldy words. I’d have stuck the barrel of the pistol to his forehead and, sublime as he ever was, he would even thank me for granting him the iron’s cool touch in the final moments of his life. Midnight sparrowhawks rose up, shaken, from the tables. Halfway through the foxtrot a shot rang out and when the lights came up they saw me, kissing the blood that ran across the shadow’s face. It tasted bittersweet and when I awoke from my dream I said so. 
—from "Selections from Ballads of Sweet Jim," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

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2024 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

March 27, 2024 - By Staff

Congratulations to MICHAEL LAVERS, winner of this year's Anne Halley Poetry Prize!

Nathan McClain and Abigail Chabitnoy have selected Michael Lavers' poem "Sun, Birds, and Leaves" from MR's Summer 2023 issue (Vol. 64, Issue 2) for the prestigious prize.

MICHAEL LAVERS is the author of After Earth and The Inextinguishable, both published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Southwest Review, Best New Poets 2015...

10 Questions for Kayhan Irani

March 14, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

OPENING: A pair of sheer white curtains undulate as a breeze blows. They are suspended in air, floating on their own. Behind them, pitch black. 

NARRATOR
We are here, at a criss-cross of story and memory, place and time.
We are here to witness and listen, to embrace and mend the fractures.
Why are you here?

(Four options appear in orange text. TO WITNESS; TO LISTEN; TO EMBRACE; TO MEND. Choose one to move ahead.)
—from "There Is a Portal," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first full length plays I wrote was in the fourth grade, and it was a play about a suffragette who was organizing her friends...

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Francesco Pascuzzi

March 11, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

There was no Google where you could type in "gay liberation" or "trans" and find all there was to know. Even the term "homosexual" wasn't used, and to take back a title from a pamphlet in FUORI!, it was an "unmentionable practice." The first time I'd heard about it publicly was in November of 1975 after the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. News programs on TV made allusions rather than actual statements about his ascertained or presumed homosexuality. It was precisely on the occasion of the school assembly that was held after his murder that I first came out, supported by my firends in the collective.
—from "Coming Out," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated...

10 Questions for Noor ('Ditee) Jaber

March 4, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

You approach and I offer
another girl's name. Curtains, velvet
and crushed, mostly closed. 

See it this way: coyote's tooth dangling
coy from my locs.
You approach (my hair draping, obscuring my face)
and it falls

Tonight, like disco lights, beckons my self
to myself. There's just enough light
for me.
—from "Of Starshine and Clay," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote a lot of poetry in high school to reckon with my enormous, overwhelming feelings. I don’t remember much from that period of my life but I remember writing a lot. The first poem I remember pouring out of me was a slam poem I wrote in college. It was...