(Part Two) Inside me, though, there is also a writerly self. This me is like a ferocious crocodile that fights to find food and freedom. He’s used to winning and often tears his adversaries to pieces in a single bite, so he’s a pretty fearsome beast. This writer/crocodile self argues that all . . .
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(Part One) Inside me there’s also a militant self. It first showed itself when I was very young; later it became more stealthy, like a spring with water that doesn’t rise to the surface, leaving the stream bed dry. Throughout my life he has always made an effort to keep current and . . .
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Inside me exists a self that years ago decided to study agronomy—where that idea came from exactly, who knows? Many aspects of our selves remain a mystery. For forty years this self did work in soil science, and, even at a time when few were talking about climate change, he always felt . . .
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‘Twas the midst of December: there came forth a cryFrom us beer drinkers wond’ring which brews we shall buyFor festivities, feasting, for sitting by fires.It’s the holidays! Taste all the good that transpires.‘Tis the time to be stocking your holiday shelfWith the richly full-flavored beers. (Move over, elf!) First Diwali and Hanukkah . . .
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My first real job: barmaid.I stood: I stared. I pouredcabernet: I dried expensivewine glasses with a chamois cloth—from “Psalm,” Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2021) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I made my first chapbook when I was five, with colored construction paper and yarn: a short allegorical . . .
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A Review of Simon Frost’s Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics: A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900 (State University of New York Press, 2021). Studies in the field of book history hold a perverse fascination for me. I can never approach them solely as an academic, for the . . .
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Look, I’m alive. And this park, Wright Park it’s called—a scrappy woodland just a half mile down the road from my home—is alive too, living and dying at once, whether I’m there to see it or not.—from “Wildflower Season,” Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021) Tell us about one of the first . . .
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Still it keeps encroaching, the prickly dread, waiting past midnight as sleep comes in stutters, until you quit trying. As branches scratch tree songs at your windows and shadows scurry like mice across the sills. Because time is ticking down. An inevtiable end approaching, the unmarked cars turning onto your street, their . . .
Read MoreJoin Gina Apostol, Omar El Akkad, Shailja Patel, and Joseph Earl Thomas, alongside Roy Scranton and Noy Holland to launch MR’s Climate issue. To celebrate the launch of our winter 2021 special issue on the climate crisis, the Massachusetts Review is pleased to announce a reading with contributors Gina Apostol, Joseph Earl . . .
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When someone is brought back from an overdose by Narcan, it can be a violent business: the body goes into immediate and intense withdrawal, and it can feel like you’ve had the shit kicked out of you. The person may be confused and terrified, and so it seems a reasonable repsonse to . . .
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