Editor’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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
“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,” . . .
Read More
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” . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More@josephbrodsky puts on a snuggly tune,tweets a few words: “December. Like counting spoonsin the sideboard after a guest is gone.”Grins on rereading:this is the perfect tone. Gets up, goes to the window, looks out. It strikeshim that the day, still young, has grown dusky. Likea snowflake that—having lived a second in flight,fragile, . . .
Read More
“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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read More
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 . . .
Read MoreThese erasures are created from pages of Fascinating Womanhood, a 1963 “self-improvement” manual for wives, with whose author I (once) shared a religious background. It urged women to suppress their intelligence and capability, and make themselves childlike, dependent, and “feminine.” I first encountered it in the library of the religious institute across the . . .
Read More