Would you like a cigarette? I’d prefer Talking Mule, 1979 Burgundy. Texture and hie of Bethlehem rust. Notes of must, slate, and pre-coital rouge when tongued to the roof of the mouth. Bold finish, lingering up to seventeen seconds, diminishing to uvular frog. 3.5 stars.— from “Police Interrogation of Food Critic B.W. . . .
Read MoreThe Massachusetts Review presents a virtual poetry reading with Danusha Laméris, featuring her poem from the Spring 2020 issue , “Detour.”
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(Photo by Fabio Venni) Gabriella Kuruvilla’s story, “That’s Life, Honey,” presents an array of narrative elements that are unprecedented in their native Italian context and certainly unusual in English. We have a teenage speaker, named Natasha, whom we indirectly learn—based on the sex workers lining her street—lives in a degraded area of . . .
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(Photo montage courtesy of Dejan Vekić) Sex, Money and Shakespeare In my second week of the lockdown in Denmark, a friend asked me to look again at Shakespeare’s sonnets for an academic anthology that she was planning. I am a fervent admirer of the sonnets, and when I started re-reading them yet . . .
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“Once upon a time,” we say—a custom every self-respecting storyteller must follow as a way of opening a window onto another world, elsewhere in time, space, and dimension. . . . So, once upon a time. . . but this time, it was the very beginnning, the very first time. . . . . .
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My dad, who liked confusing little kids, used to sing: “Of all the creatures who have wings, I prefer the flying pig.” At first, I was suspicious of the song, and later on it annoyed me. When I was about six, he would take me for walks around the outskirts of Moreno, . . .
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Photo: Photograph of Robert Pruitt, Cedric Angeles Gwendolyn B. Bennett To a Dark Girl I love you for your brownnessAnd the rounded darkness of your breastI love you for the breaking sadness in your voiceAnd shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest.Something of old forgotten queensLurks in the lithe abandon of your walkAnd something . . .
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Photo: Photograph of Jacob Lawrence, Carl Van Van Vechten, Courtesy of the Library of Congress In the summer of 1941, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington to draw attention to the exclusion of African Americans from positions in the national defense industry, . . .
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Winter kept us warm . . .—T. S. Eliot I’m writing this on National Beer Day in the United States, where we’re also celebrating National Poetry Month. So it’s a good time to catch up with the fifth Whitman tribute from Bell’s Brewery, Song of the Open Road. In these quarantine times when we’ve got . . .
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Photo: Prine in 1975. Tom Hill/Wireimage Like a lot of folks since the news came in, I’ve been listening again to John Prine. Among his fans, though, I suspect I was the only one to be reminded of a class in Paris with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a few days after . . .
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