The final year of high school in Palestine, known as Tawjihi, has always symbolized more than just exams. It’s a year of dreams, a year in which every student’s aspirations meet their family’s ambitions. The future of a nation rests on the shoulders of our generation. But in Gaza, Tawjihi has become . . .
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“She woke up so happy. One of the nuns opened the bedroom door and crossed the narrow aisle between the beds. As the day’s first gentle sounds touched the silence—the door opening, the thin rubber soles on the wood parquet—some of the women woke up. Leaning slightly to-ward the window, the nun . . .
Read MoreEditor’s Note: The Dalai Lama celebrated his ninetieth birthday on July 6th and will observe the next twelve months as a “year of compassion.” The Massachusetts Review shares today an excerpt from contributor Amy Yee’s narrative nonfiction book, Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents . . .
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When she was 28, Jessica Slice quite literally stumbled into disability while on a hike in Greece with her then-husband. Tired and hot after an hour-long trek, they turned a corner and were confronted by a pack of wild dogs. Though they managed to avoid attack by backing away and scrambling up . . .
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“I’m in the call room at the Suicide Prevention Center (SPC) when the phone rings. I hate it when the phone rings. I’ve never had a three-hour shift when it didn’t ring, but sometimes there are long stretches of silence. I pray for those long stretches of silence.”—from Janis Bultman’s “Suicide Prevention,” . . .
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Elise Paschen’s latest collection is Blood Wolf Moon, our from Red Hen. Her poem “Heritage” appeared in our A GATHERING OF NATIVE VOICES issue back in 2020. BOA Editions recently published Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, the latest collection from poet Keetje Kuipers, whose poem “I, Too, Took Pictures of My Body” . . .
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After months of war in my neighborhood of Al-Shujaiya—a place that was once full of life and laughter—everything was gone. No homes, no people, no signs of the world we once knew. After the third invasion, it became a ghost town, buried in silence and rubble. During the genocide, before we had . . .
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“I have collected words for air in languages I know and want to know. Hawa, air, wind, foo, aire, breeze . . . I say the words consciously—to note how my mouth and its insides behave as I pronounce them. It opens, to let air in and out. Every morning I open . . .
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A Review of On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies by Jennifer Nelson “Surrect” has been used twice in English. Once in 1692 by Leonard Plukenet, the English botanist, in a letter to John Ray, also a botanist, comparing Polygonum minus candicans supinum to Paronychia hispanica. (“Which is a more . . .
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Some of us were born into fire. Others into silence. But for us in Gaza—our first breath came with the taste of fear. The world met us with its back turned. Sometimes our pain, hunger, and fear get romanticized or turned into some kind of heroicnarrative—as if we chose this, or as . . .
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