The Massachusetts Review

A quarterly of literature, the arts and public affairs since 1959. About Subscribe Digital Chapbooks Become a Contributor Follow us: Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube

[biblioartsbyemma]

Summer reading, anyone?

[thepenguinpress]

It’s a two coffees needed kind of Monday ☕️ beautiful shot by @bookbaristas! #summerreading #amreading #coffeeshop

[thepenguinpress]

“And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.” One of the many beautiful lines in Devotions, on sale 10/10 #maryoliver #summerreading

[themassreview]

Hello Tumblr, it's been a while! Our summer issue is out now, featuring fantastic poetry, prose, translations, and art. View a preview and buy it now on our website!

[themassreview]

From our archives, "Valentines Day" by Hadara Bar-Nadav Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 2004)

[themassreview]

Today on the blog: Editor Emeritus Jules Chametzky writes about living in the age of McCarthyism in #OurAmerica. Catch him being interviewed tomorrow morning on the Bill Newman Show on WHMP at 9:00.

[themassreview]

"I address this capsule memoir especially to those of you who take boisterous, passionate delight in retracing trajectories of your major life discoveries and convergences..."

[themassreview]

TIME SERVED (Working Title 2.2)

The Massachusetts Review presents the latest Working Titles e-book: “TIME SERVED by Malcolm Garcia–available this week!

From Time Served:

I heard about Jose Chavez-Alvarez by chance, just after my journalism career crashed with the recession in 2008. I survived five rounds of layoffs at a daily newspaper before the sixth round tagged me.

           Out of work for months, desperate, I accepted a job as a groundskeeper at a country club for minimum wage. Emptying trash, cutting golf course fairways, raking sand bunkers. My life as a reporter began slipping away. I determined to hang on to it. When the country club closed for the winter, I had a few months to freelance and regain my footing. Until then, I used my half-hour lunch breaks and the hours after work to pitch story ideas to editors.

           Initially I thought I’d write about homeless Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, a topical subject, good for the holidays when readers are interested in the poor. I had been embedded as a reporter in Afghanistan and knew people involved with social service nonprofits that worked with homeless vets.

           “You really ought to do a story on deported vets,” one social worker told me.

           I had no idea noncitizens served in the U.S. military, let alone that veterans were being deported. My contact gave me the name of Hector Barajas, an army veteran and recovering alcoholic and drug addict who was deported to Mexico in 2004. He crossed back into the United States illegally a short time later but was caught and deported again in 2009. He then started a support house for deported veterans in Tijuana.

Purchase now at Weightless Books, Amazon or Kobo.

[themassreview]

Galway Kinnell was born this day in 1927, his poem "SEX" appeared in our Fall 2006 Issue (Vol 47, Issue 3)

[themassreview]

Andrea Stone, on the MR blog: "Defining nationhood in possessive terms reflects the notion that nationalism is the work of imagined possession and therefore also exclusion. If something is ours, it cannot be yours. This election has focused almost entirely on whom America belongs to. The slogan “we’re going to take our country back” implied its return to its rightful owner. But it didn’t mean a return to the people."

[themassreview]

We are thrilled to announce Gary J. Whitehead as the winner of the ANNE HALLEY POETRY PRIZE for his poem, "Music from a Farther Room," published in our special Words and Music Winter issue, out now (Vol 57 Issue 4). For more info on Gary, and to read his poem, check out our website. To read a 10Q interview with him about his work and this poem in particular, check out our blog!

[themassreview]

"...I had considered myself almost numb to the constant tragedies permeating my community and the communities of people dear to me, but in the cases of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile as well as the Pulse Orlando massacre, my spirit was heavy with grief and frustration. The dance studio afforded me the space to share and cope, to create work that—one hopes—will allow others to do the same."

Joshua L Ishmon of the Deeply Rooted Dance Theater talks about empathy, dance, and Black Lives Matter in Favorite Things: https://www.massreview.org/node/679

[themassreview]

"Collage, agglomeration, accumulation and declamation, les memes as no more than memes. As the late twentieth-century poet Pete Shelley put it, 'noise annoys.' Call this the dominant trend in experimental writing in French up to around 1940. . . Blankness, absence, gaps and fissures, no choses from which to choose. As the late twentieth-century poet Ian Curtis put it, 'listen to the silence, let it ring on.' Call this a dominant trend in experimental writing in French after around 1945,"

Today in MASSACHUSETTS REVIEWS: MR Editor Michael Thurston  reviews new translations of Philippe Soupault (from City Lights Booksellers & Publishers) and Jean Daive (from Omnidawn Publishing).

[themassreview]

"The Scarlet Professor ... gives us not only the life story of Arvin but also a mini-social history of America at the time of the raid on Arvin’s apartment in September, 1960, He was raided by the Anti-Smut Unit of the Massachusetts State Police, who were acting in accordance with Eisenhower-era laws that prohibited the distribution of obscene materials via the mail." Harley Erdman discusses turning The Scarlet Professor into an opera (which will be excerpted in our upcoming Music Issue), in Favorite Things.

[themassreview]

Chaotic Freedom in Civil War Louisiana (Working Titles 2.1)

The Massachusetts Review presents the eight Working Titles e-book: "Chaotic Freedom" in Civil War Louisiana by Bruce Laurie–available this week!

From "Chaotic Freedom" in Civil War Louisiana:

    This essay offers additional insight into the motivations of comparatively ordinary soldiers--two men whose Civil War stories have never been told in full. Henry S. Gere and Marshall S. Stearns brought different points of view to their wartime service. Gere was an abiding abolitionist, the kind of soldier described by Manning. Stearns had no obvious politics, and yet both men were strongly influenced not so much by Copperheadism of the heroism of black men in uniform--though this bravery was influential--but by what they learned about race and slavery. They were appalled by what they understood to be the malice of bondage, yet also encouraged by what the learned from personal interaction with fugitive slaves in greater Baton Rouge. Their role in the making of the image of Peter was no accident: it was a deliberate act that captured for them a powerful symbol--an emblem of the cruelty of a system that could not stand.

Purchase on Weightless, Amazon, or Kobo.

[themassreview]

"We Latin-Americans know his bullying type. But this was different. This was larger. This felt as if something essential had just been shattered, as if something cavernous and evil had just woken up." - #OurAmerica: What Kind of World

[themassreview]

“As Rosa Luxemburg said,” she cracks a small smile, “you either have socialism, or you will have barbarism.” - #OurAmerica: Planet Trump