MQR Sound

A note about the work "Nocturnist" from Celeste Lipkes: “Ultimately, there are always several reasons for everything we do,” writes Judith Hermann “—those we know of, and those we suspect. And those we know nothing of.” It is these latter two categories that haunt my work as a writer, and have increasingly drawn me to the essay form. I began writing “Nocturnist” during the research block...

A note about the work "The Death" from Mary Jo Bang: “The Death” is from The Museum of Mary, a book-length series of ekphrastic poems where each poem has a debt to a woman named Mary. My approach here, as with all the poems in the series, was to find an artwork that featured a Mary and use that as a stage setting from which a speaker could address any number of concerns. In this poem, th...

A note about the work "Bad Person" from Joanna Pearson: I’ve been listening to the new Leon Neyfakh podcast, “OnlyFantasy,” an exploration of the popularity of OnlyFans or, as the podcast puts it, “a search for the roots of digital intimacy.” It’s catnip for me. One of my obsessions as a writer is loneliness and our desire for connection—especially how that’s mediated by our access to on...

A note about the work "Wild Light" from Sarah Gerkensmeyer: When my youngest son was in early grade school, he was asked (on a worksheet) to write a sentence using the words "wild" and "light." He wrote: "Is the light wild?" For about a decade now, that sentence has haunted me in a good way. I knew it could morph into the title of a future story, and perhaps...

A note about the work "I Can Imagine It for Us" from Mai Serhan: I wrote this memoir to understand myself as a Palestinian who’s never been to Palestine and who is denied the right of return. By narrating an absence, I hoped to make Palestine tangible to myself; to resist erasure and to find a way to return, even if only through memory and imagination.   I’m a second-generation Palestini...

A note about the work "Sunday at Mt. Carmel" from Jesus De La Torre : I started this story nearly a decade or more ago, so I can’t say I know with any sort of certainty what its genesis was. I do recall in those years writing about Mexican people living in the U.S. who couldn’t attend to their sick or their dead back home because of their status in the country. They couldn’t leave the co...

A note about the work "Fear It" from Sophie Ezzell: I started writing this piece because I had an ex-girlfriend who called herself a swan. For years, I just kept putting little facts about swans in my pocket and started seeing connections between water, religion, and swans. I also like the idea of complicating this beautiful, feminine, fairytale creature into something capable of harm as...

A note about the work "Talismans" from Marcela Sulak for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: I had been reading the poetry of Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), the Syrian poet, and one day came upon a passionate and beautiful poem called "Talismans," which describes a yearning for love.  Its warmth and quotidian language, its organic materials, invited me to ima...

A note about the work "There were no poets of motherhood," from Leah Falk for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: Motherhood has animated my poems since I became pregnant with my first daughter in 2019, but in this poem I return to a memory from before I had children, when motherhood was still an abstraction. After graduating from college, I worked in a bookstore near...

A note about the work "Sun Theater Sonnets" (Stanzas 5-7) from Deema Shehabi for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: I wrote this poem as an exploration of how daughters are perpetual placeholders for their mothers even after a mother’s death. This is manifested as inheriting the mother’s memories as one’s own, which can be enriching yet challenging due to the lack of differentiatio...

A note about the work “War is always silent until it's done” from Ezza Ahmed for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 Issue: Warsan Shire has a brilliant poem called “War Poem” and in the second stanza there’s imagery of war giving birth to another war. With that sentiment in mind, I was looking at the exit strategies from the stories of my loved ones and that’s how this poem began...

A note about the work "Foreshadow Work" from Anni Liu for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 issue: I was finally able to access effective therapy last year, and that has meant engaging in “shadow work,” or integrating the parts of the self that have been hidden or rejected. I realized poetry has always been a site of shadow work for me, foreshadowing the work I would do in...

A note about the work "It's safe to say" from Sanjana Bijlani for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 issue: I wrote the first draft of this poem in the morning, a time when I feel most able to connect with the dreamscape of sleep, the wistfulness I feel at not being able to stay within it as the day's routines await. I think I began the poem to try and find language...

A note about the work “The Florist” from Laurie Blauner for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: This is a longer poem than I had previously written. It’s part of a new poetry manuscript and ends the section titled “An Occupation” which includes many different jobs. I had noticed several florist shops in Seattle and imagined working in one. When I wrote the poem it just kept continui...

A note about the work “Ditch and Drain, Fill and Build” from Amy Benson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: I’ve been working on a manuscript about rising seas and the myths about floods that have been told in the past, are being told now, and might be told in the future. I got interested in the relationship between land and water and realized that I knew very little about the “...

A note about the work “The Ant and the Grasshopper” from Hema Padhu for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: One of my favorite short stories is Trevor William’s A Choice of Butchers, and to some extent, his story inspired me to write this one. I’m drawn to children’s perspectives. I think adults don’t give them enough credit for what they see and understand. A child’s perspectiv...

A note about the work “on hunger” from Diya Abbas for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: Chiasmus is the grammatical technique of inversion. This poem uses chiasmus, or concatenation, to create entrapment for the speaker, the subject, and the reader. I wrote this poem because I was frustrated with time. I hoped this technique would build a contamination of belief where sound, the r...

A note about the work “My Left Hand, Unholy” from Sanjana Thakur for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: I took a poetry seminar on descriptive writing in the first year of my MFA. One of our assignments was to choose an object in our home and write a half-page of visual description about it. I chose a red onion. A year and a half later, I wrote "My Left Hand, Unholy" for a fiction...

A note about the work "Blue Skies, Birdsong" from Leyla Loued-Khenissi for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: Blue Skies, Birdsong recounts a harrowing ordeal Leyla Loued-Khenissi and her family experienced during the 1997 Sierra Leone military coup. Over 24 hours, their home was attacked 16 times by armed rebels and civilians before they escaped to safety. This first-person narrat...

A note about the work “Insult” from Martín Espada for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: “Insult” is about poet William Carlos Williams, and the drive to survive, even transcend the “insults” of our lives to carry out our work and make our voices heard. Williams was one of the twentieth century’s most important poets, receiving the first National Book Award in Poetry in 1950 an...

A note about the work “Excerpts from Skyside ” from Stéphanie Ferrat translated by Marissa Davis for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Fall 2024 Translation Issue: I stumbled upon Skyside at a poetry fair in Paris several years ago, and it captivated me from the first page. As a painter as well as a poet, Ferrat imbues her work with meditations on the creative process, touching on both the miracles...

A note about the work "The Easy Part" from Ismael Ramos for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Fall 2024 Translation Issue: Who would want to marry a secondary character?” I found myself wondering one day, as I walked along the river near my parent’s house. The truth is, there were other questions lurking beneath that one. In the era of social media, are we able to generate endless expectations beyon...

A note about the work “Mother of Stone” from Terry Ann Thaxton for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue:  I have a photograph of my parents standing next to each other, leaning against our station wagon on one of our numerous and regular camping trips. My father is shirtless, smiling and wearing his bucket hat. My mother is not smiling. I sensed that my parents did not like each o...

A note about the work “Archival” from Patrycja Humienik for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I wrote this poem (part of my forthcoming book, We Contain Landscapes ), in response to Diana Al-Hadid’s exhibit “Archive of Longings” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA in 2021. I was invited to create a workshop in conversation with the work, for which I led participants in mov...

A note about the work “So Like a Waking” from Peter E. Murphy for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: 1. Eight years and almost fifty drafts, writing "So Like a Waking" was a pain in the ass. 2. I couldn’t . . . wouldn’t accept that I was an alcoholic. Bums shitting themselves on a park bench or in the gutter, they were alcoholics, not me. Sure, I woke up on a park ben...