The “tireless telling of alternative stories,” to echo Cathy Schlund-Vials’ words, is how Asian American literature combats xenophobia and closed-mindedness—the stubbornly repeated, and frankly boring, stories told by madmen. Asian Americans have many ways to tell our many stories. And, as we grow into our immense, unwieldy diversity as a social-political community, . . .
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Read Part Four here. “To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliantBlue” You probably remember where you were, what you were doing, when a brilliant blue September sky, the kind some of us look forward to throughout the hot and hazy end of August, was suddenly, strangely, riven by off-course . . .
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The famished ermine trimming the patron’s coat was meant as an emblem of wealth. Is this the real-time sorrow and how did Beurer bring it out on the patrician’s face through brumal medieval afternoons when they sit near each other as still as two lemons, —from “An Old Man in Great Trouble,” . . .
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A Review of The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia, edited by Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal (Harper Collins, 2020) “They say This world isn’t for youWhy then was I born into it, if it wasn’t for me.” These lines hit you like a gust of unforgiving . . .
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When the Massachusetts Review approached me to do a photo essay on local life under the COVID-19 lockdown, my first thought was, How could I possibly capture the pandemic? Could I physically do this? On March 5th, I had undergone rotator cuff surgery. Forty years of heavy cameras slung around my shoulders, the tools of . . .
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(Man Ray, Observatory Time: The Lovers [1936], detail) Read Part Three here. “September has come and I wake.” The calendar turns, and the new month is like a new day. After three beginnings in endings, Louis MacNeice offers a beginning at the beginning. Awakening from the dark night that has hung over the second . . .
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The days had been dry, rainless. And even without rain, there was green there, sprouting in the backyard. That’s what he was thinking about that day and what he was going to ask Dad when he got home. Why the green was sprouting there, right in front of the step where he . . .
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“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”-Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (Republican, Wisconsin) 09 February 1950 Having . . .
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A review of Empires by John Balaban (Copper Canyon Press 2019) In a John Balaban poem, random acts of both kindness and destruction happen in profusion, but what they fall upon is never nameless. A resourceful diction—plus a wry, casual mastery of metaphor—nail the scene. From “Cibolero”: “the rain, dropping its dark curtains…” . . .
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When one braids togethera horseand a fence it isn’t pretty:mangle of mane and wire, twisted legscedar splints. Once on a hillin a far countryI watched some horses across a dust road—from “Range,” Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Hmmm. One piece, back in . . .
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