It wasn’t the beach reading I’d planned on or brought along (that was a bag of mystery novels and a book on the financial crisis), but when I found it at Herridge Books on an afternoon browse in Wellfleet, I had to add it to the list. Published in October, 1959, the . . .
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The introductory chapter to Priscilla Hayner’s comparative study of truth commissions begins simply and dramatically. The author quotes an exchange with a Rwandan government officer, the sole survivor from his immediate family. One out of seventeen. The occasion for their conversation was a visit to the church at Nyarubuye, a scene of . . .
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JEROME LIEBLING,April 16, 1924 – July 27, 2011 A work of many – this, perhaps, is themost wonderful thing about any literary magazine. E pluribus unum. The Massachusetts Review has been exceptionally fortunate inthe caliber of those who have committed their energies to our cause. An MR editor and contributor for over forty years, Jerry Liebling was among . . .
Read MoreA friend of mine, a few years ago, told me that he’d taken to reading poetry in the morning. “It has replaced,” he said, “the habit of prayer.” In the current poetic landscape there’s precious little to make one feel prayerful, but for a meditative conduit to the actual, to imaginary gardens . . .
Read More“Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”… I’ve always liked that phrase, from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Even more so because these days I regularly come across suggestions that the self itself may be nothing but story. “Nothing but” – I must insist – is a far cry from “just” or “merely.” Readers of MR, or any . . .
Read MoreWelcome to the new and improved Massachusetts Review Online! Through our new site, we will be bringing you more from our current issues as well as our rich archive, including readings, artwork, conversations with authors and artists, and with this, our new blog, MR Notes. We hope our readers will find here the same level . . .
Read MoreThe 2011 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Joanne Dominique Dwyer for her poem Bull’s-eye Volume 51, Issue 2 Joanne Dominique Dwyer was born and raised in New York State, but has lived in New Mexico for most of her adult life where she studied and practiced Acupuncture for a number of years . . .
Read MoreThe 2010 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Donald Morrill for his poem Enemy Infant! Volume 50, Issue 3 Donald Morrill is the author of two volumes of poetry, At the Bottom of the Sky and With Your Back to Half the Day, as well as four books of nonfiction: The Untouched Minutes (winner of the River . . .
Read MoreThe 2009 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Marilyn Hacker for her poems Ghazal: min al-hobbi ma khatal, and Ghazal: dar al-harb Volume 49, Issue 1&2 Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006) and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). Recent . . .
Read MoreThe 2008 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Ralph Black for 21st Century Lecture Volume 48, Issue 3 Ralph Black’s poems have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly and the Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, among other journals. His first book, Turning Over the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions. He teaches at SUNY . . .
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