The Massachusetts Review presents the newest e-book in our Working Titles series: Cape Cod, Revisited by Michael Thurston, with an introduction by Russ Rymer. Available now! “Cape Cod begins with a shipwreck. On October 9, 1849, Henry David Thoreau and William Ellery Channing traveled together to Cape Cod. Having planned to take the steamer from Boston . . .
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(Photo from vinepair.com) Read Part 2 here. “August is nearly over.” I forget, from year to year, how Autumn Journal begins with an insistence upon endings. Summer is ending in section I, August is ending in section III, and, in the section that falls between those, MacNeice contemplates the ultimate ending. Such emphasis is consonant . . .
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You must go to Brno to see the rain. There are writers who have written almost exclusively about Brno and almost exclusively about what it’s like when it rains there. Brno in the rain is a sadder place than anywhere else in the world, but in a less personally inflected way: the . . .
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You unwittingly keep a catalogue of embarrassments on hand, lifetime-deep, ready to be flipped open to any page should the right moment present itself. The right moment is usually wrong, conventionally speaking: the bus driver doesn’t want to hear it, no matter what stop you’re at; stramgers waiting for the crossing signal . . .
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—a window opens and shuts;doors swing open, for a moment winddances in, dancesbackout, and again doorposts, doorposts, and hinges unyielding as warriors, and high doorsills, and locks, locks, like women in armor.— from (siege) . . .
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Photo by Chen-Pan Liao (CC BY-SA 3.0) Read Part 1 here. “Spider, spider, twisting tight . . .. . . in the web of night” Back home in London, Louis MacNeice has trouble sleeping. Section II of Autumn Journal is a nocturnal meditation, a dark night of the soul. Worrying over Being and Becoming, stasis . . .
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“What are you doing here?” Betania was standing on a corner, two blocks from home. Nervous. She wore an old dress and had her hair loosely tied up in a bun. If it weren’t for the carelessness of her appearance, she might have been taken for a novice prostitute. “What are you . . .
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(Photo: first edition book cover, Faber and Faber, 1939) “Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire.” So begins Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), a poem that recounts the poet’s experience—physical, emotional, intellectual, memorial, associational—during one consequential fall. Between the poem’s opening in August and its conclusion at the turn of the year, Britain . . .
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Maggie fans her hand out on the windowpane. She brings her mouth close to the glass and huffs hot breath, leaving behind the web of her handprint ringed by fog. “Mom,” she says peering through the stencil, “I think there’s someone outside.” Maggie’s mother, Magalys, shoves her feet into slippers, grabs her . . .
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What is the Future of Asian American Poetry? Before imagining the future, I must begin in the past, considering how we’ve arrived in the present moment. When it comes to Asian American poetry, the first question is always what defines Asian American poetry and where it begins. Does our tradition begin with . . .
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