My name is Sarah Mahmoud. I was born twenty-eight years ago in Jabalia, northern Gaza. My father was a teacher, and my mother a devoted homemaker, who held our family together with love and patience. I was the youngest of five sisters—Dalal, Hazar, Ghada, and two others. In those days, our home . . .
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A Review of Sign and Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition What is poetry? What is voice? These are the questions that editors Philip Brady and Shanta Lee ask in Sign and Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, a wide-ranging new poetic anthology published by Etruscan Press. Sign and Breath features 49 . . .
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and know: the clouds don’t know about the rain,and the water doesn’t know about the leavesfrom which it beats the music, rhythms, language —from Arno Bohlmeijer’s translation of “Become,” by Esther Jansma, Vol 66 Issue 3 (Fall 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.“The Intruder,” Encounter Magazine, UK . . .
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Where it’s fall not winter spring not summer cool not cold –Chris Thile As we turn from the warmth to the cool-ness of autumnal days, from our Köl-sches and pilsners and lightIPAs, try this flightOf white Belgians. Delight In their mellowness, variant glowsThat their bright cloudiness can bestow.Equinoctial weatherBrings flavors togetherTo pause . . .
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Gimena recognized two things. One: her neighbors meant no real harm, that they were merely bored, and an element of drama, no matter how false, was too juicy to deny; and two: she would turn into an ugly, bitter, unrecognizable version of herself if she stayed amongst them. —from J. Nevada’s “What . . .
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Happy scenes made me perfectly bitter that autumn. The season dragged on instead of running its course, looping back in a closed curve. Instead of moving from spring to summer to autumn, it was autumn, autumn, and autumn again. Would winter ever arrive? —from “Autumn Heatwave” by Park Seon Woo, translated by . . .
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This essay was first prepared as a talk on caste, class, and race for the third annual Association of Postcolonial Thought symposium at UMass Amherst. As an ethnographer, I planned to draw on the work I have done in the city I have loved every day of my life, a place that . . .
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On Saturday two men came to slaughter the palm, whose exuberant pinnate leaves I had made a habit of watching each morning from my post inside the bedroom, head cocked on the pillow. My Observation of the palm’s swaying became a course in breathing, a crown of exemplary lungs to follow, learning . . .
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Marissa Davis‘ poetry collection End of Empire arrived back in July 2025 from Penguin. Both her translation work and her own poetry have appeared in MR‘s pages, in MR 62.2 and 65.3, respectively. Cynthia White‘s collection, Glossogenesis, is out from Sundress Publications and their e-chap series. White’s poem “Footpad” came out in . . .
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I was sorry to bother her. I was always sorry to lift my hand, make the fist, knock, knock. Always at the dinner hour, that’s when you caught them at home. But isn’t it odd—I never interrupted anyone’s dinner, not in all my years of knock, knock. People would come to the . . .
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