Volume 42, Issue 3
FRONT COVER: Patrick Dougherty
PARADISE GATE
Installation at Smith College
Photographed by Robert Tobey
With this issue The Massachusetts Review begins a season of change. Jules Chametzky, founding editor and guiding intelligence for these forty-two years, is stepping down. This is too small a space to rehearse Jules’s myriad virtues. That requires an issue in itself, and we will have one. Let’s just say that it is hard to imagine MR without his grace, humor, critical acumen, and vast frame of cultural reference. You will still find him at the top of the masthead, where as far as we’re concerned he will always be.
We are also sorry to announce the resignation of our managing editor Christian Hawkey, who has made MR‘s operations as efficient as a literary quarterly’s can be. Christian begins a new life of writing and teaching; he has left us a poem as a keepsake. We have been fortunate to find his successor in Corwin Ericson, poet, sculptor, and experienced editor with deep roots in the literary community of Western Massachusetts.
Thanks are due to many friends who have helped in this time of transition. Daniel Fitzgibbons, editor of The Campus Chronicle, the weekly newspaper for faculty and staff at the University, and Professor John Nelson of the University’s English Department, each donated a computer. But our deepest gratitude goes to the dozens of our supporting members who responded so generously. We’ll salute them more grandly in the ensuing issue.
D.L., for the editors
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
Olympic Begging Finals (Berkeley, 1994); My Wife Dreams of Prince Sihanouk, poems by Angelo Verga
The Day His Wife’s Face Froze, a story by Ron Tanner
In My Son’s Cambodia, by Nancy Kline
The Moose and the Murderess, a poem by Anna Meek
Souvenir, a story by Stephanie Allen
Across to the Free Zone; Mirsada, poems by Anna Marie Craighead-Kintis
The Hurtling, a poem by John Witte
The Most Forgotten Alien Land, by George J. Makari
Giving the Finger; Waving; Shaking Hands, poems by Matt Yurdana
Sausages, a story by Michelle Hoover
Gener, a story by D. E. Steward
Tuesday at 6, Waiting for the Duchess, a poem by George Eklund
In Retrospect, a poem by Doris Abramson
In Chess Season, by Alyce Miller
To Go Back; Day of Anger, poems by Marta Petreu, translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Christina Illias-Zarifopol
Paradise, a story by Jean Ryan
Exotic Winter, a poem by Jennifer Tseng
The Cool Life and the Death of the Dragon Lady, by Robert H. Abel
Goya’s Grotesquerie, a poem by Christian Hawkey
A Perfect Circle, a story by Daniel Griffin
The Animal in Life, a poem by Betsy Snow Hickok
Timex Pugilistes, a poem by DC Berry
Contributors
Robert h. Abel‘s novel, Riding a Tiger, was published by Asia 2000 in Hong Kong. He has received a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and an NEA Fellowship.
Doris Abramson is Professor Emeritus of Theater at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her collection of poems, It’s Time, was published in 1999.
Stephanie Allen‘s fiction appears in Waterstone, Black Water Review, and Connecticut Review. She received an MFA from the University of Maryland.
DC Berry lives in Columbia, Mississippi. His publications include Divorce Boxing and Saigon Cemetery.
Anna Marie Craighead-Kintis teaches at Columbia College in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in The Evergreen Chronicle, Ink, and F News Magazine.
George Eklund‘s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Sycamore Review, and Quarterly West. He teaches at Morehead State University in Kentucky.
Daniel Griffin lives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Geist and Prairie Fire.
Christian Hawkey lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Betsy Snow Hickok is a writer and singer living in Iowa City. Her work has appeared in New Virginia Review, Poetry East, and the anthology, Voices on the Landscape.
Born and raised in Iowa, Michelle Hoover teaches at Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts. Her stories have appeared in Cutbank and The Cream City Review. “Sausages” is from a novel-in-progress, The Swallow and the Nightingale.
Romanian-born Christina Illias-Zarifopol teaches at Indiana University. Her translations of Marta Petreu’s poetry have appeared in The Mississippi Review and Salt Hill.
Nancy Kline is currently Director of the Writing Program at Barnard. Her books include The Faithful, How Writers Teach Writing, and The Tongue Snatchers.
George J. Makari is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
A professional violinist in Minneapolis, Anna Meek‘s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, and The Connecticut Poetry Review.
Alyce Miller teaches at Indiana University, and is the author of Stopping for Green Lights and The Nature of Longing.
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award, Marta Petreu‘s latest book, The Apocalypse According to Marta, was published in 1998. She teaches at the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj in Romania.
A native Vermonter, Jean Ryan now lives in California’s Napa Valley. Her essays and stories have appeared in Other Voices, Pleiades, Potpourri, andLynx Eye.
Adam J. Sorkin teaches at Penn State. His translations appear in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly.
D. E. Steward lives in Princeton, New Jersey. “Gener” is a one-month section of Chroma, a 172-month project.
Ron Tanner teaches writing at Loyola College in Baltimore. He has won prizes from the Faulkner Society, the Literary Review, and the Maryland Arts Council.
Jennifer Tseng lectures in Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Green Mountain Review, and Crazyhorse.
Angelo Verga‘s poems have appeared in NY Quarterly, Rain City Review, and Poetry Daily. His second collection of poems, The Six O’clock News, won the 1999 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. He can be reached at bronxpoet@earthlink.net.
John Witte‘s poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Ohio Review, and Iowa Review. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Matt Yurdana received his MFA from the University of Montana. His poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner.