The Massachusetts Review is kicking off the summer with our first of many monthly catalogues of new releases from our recent contributors. This June, we will also list earlier 2022 releases to supplement your reading. Keep your eyes peeled at the end of every month for the next installment!
2021 Kathryn A. Morton Prize winner CJ Evans’ third poetry collection, Lives, is out with Sarabande...
I found a pensión in the Barri Gòtic, not far from La Rambla. An old woman with a limp welcomed me and took my money and showed me to my room. I seem to remember that one of her shoes had a thick heel and sole (to compensate for, I suppose, an abnormally short leg), and that she stumped and shuffled ahead of me down the hall. But maybe I am misremembering this. Maybe instead it was a lazy eye. Or was she missing an arm? I don’t know, only that something about her was off, misaligned.
—from "City of Strangers," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was about 11 or 12 I wrote and illustrated a derivative fantasy about a young hero who fights a dragon that emerges from the...
“Not just what I feel but what I know
And how I know it, my unscholarliness,
My rawness, all rise out of the cobbled
Landscape I was born to.
Those of you raised similarly,
I want to say: this is not
a detriment and it is not a benefit…”
—from “My Education,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Even before I could speak, I was “writing.” I remember being pre-verbal but making up stories about the dog and cat decals on the crib headboard. One of the first actual poems I remember writing was early in high school. It was about traveling on a steamboat, and my imagined father (my own father was dead) was the captain. I...
A few years ago, I placed my younger self into a poem dreaming of a potato-
chip-flavored kiss. All-American kisses occured in lives where candy bars and
sleeping with your hair wet were also permitted, where the attention of American
mothers cast soft glowe through the house and clicked off at night.
—from "Ars Poetica," Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first pieces I wrote is a poem that I’ll quote in its entirety here:
You’re my best friend.
Let’s not let friendship end.
I like you
Because you’re so true.
I used to write this on index cards to have on hand to give to best...
The living room is crowned by a painting, one that has no purpose other than to take precedence over the armchairs. In the scene there are two deer, grazing on a sparse, dry plain: everything is yellow, from the animals to the meadow to a shadeless sky at high noon. There is something steppe-like about the painting that could have easily led to Africa but, in this moment, only reminds them of yet another hunting scene.
—from "The Odd Month," Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The very first translation project I attempted I took on out of pure academic necessity: I was taking a graduate seminar in Latin American poetry & I had to present to the class about Norah Lange, an...
Front cover by Damali Abrams
Meditate & Sip 2019
Southeast Queens, NY, photo by Kyle Jackson
Courtesy of the artist
Order a copy now
