MQR Sound

A note about the poem “Mmiri III” by .CHISARAOKWU. for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: I am working on a poetry collection that explores African women’s practice of meaning-making in the wake of sexual harm. Mmiri III is the first part of a much longer poem that captures dialogue between two women with this shared history—though in different times and different geographical spaces—as they determine what it means to have this history and be free. Water enters my work because of its dynamic nature—it holds within itself multiple states of being, yet is always free, exists everywhere. It’s essence can not be created nor destroyed. Water, thus, invites exploration of the indestructible self. Those whose bloods have traversed the waters understand this. The voice in this excerpt is from the young woman who descended from the Igbo people of present-day Eastern Nigeria. She resides in a threshold (liminal) space created in harm’s wake.

A note about the short story “Let Them Eat Kandolo: Grain Mongers June 2023, Chongwe, Zambia” from Mwanabibi Sikamo for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: I love a good market. Not a pristine library of products boxed away from touch and smell, trolleys rolling over hospital-white floors market. Not even a friendly-farmers, loose and bottled vegetables piled onto bunting lined folding tables market. No, I like a full bodied, bursting at the seams, assault on all the senses, never know who or what you might encounter market. A cacophonous African market.

In Lusaka my favorite hunting ground is City Market, which sprung out of necessity. One seller nails together wooden offcuts from her local carpenter. She piles her merchandise on the makeshift stand; a few tomatoes, maybe some greasy, freshly made fritters. The next day she is joined by someone selling roasted cassava and groundnuts, and so it goes until you have a government-sanctioned market.

As I enter City Market my heart races. I must be on high alert to avoid bumping into other buyers or sellers. I do not want to get run over by the rushing wheelbarrow boys who hiss to warn me of their presence. I walk through the hall heaving with Salaula, breathe past the earthy dried fish and tobacco, and then I am among the sacks full of grains, roots, mushroom, and other things that were not on my list.

It was on one of these jaunts, basking in the abundance that was reminiscent of childhood trips to the village that the seed for this food memoir sprouted. How could we have so much and yet still not have enough?

A note about the short story “Let Them Eat Kandolo: Amainsa 1992, Kabalenge, Zambia” from Mwanabibi Sikamo for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: I love a good market. Not a pristine library of products boxed away from touch and smell, trolleys rolling over hospital-white floors market. Not even a friendly-farmers, loose and bottled vegetables piled onto bunting lined folding tables market. No, I like a full bodied, bursting at the seams, assault on all the senses, never know who or what you might encounter market. A cacophonous African market.

In Lusaka my favorite hunting ground is City Market, which sprung out of necessity. One seller nails together wooden offcuts from her local carpenter. She piles her merchandise on the makeshift stand; a few tomatoes, maybe some greasy, freshly made fritters. The next day she is joined by someone selling roasted cassava and groundnuts, and so it goes until you have a government-sanctioned market.

As I enter City Market my heart races. I must be on high alert to avoid bumping into other buyers or sellers. I do not want to get run over by the rushing wheelbarrow boys who hiss to warn me of their presence. I walk through the hall heaving with Salaula, breathe past the earthy dried fish and tobacco, and then I am among the sacks full of grains, roots, mushroom, and other things that were not on my list.

It was on one of these jaunts, basking in the abundance that was reminiscent of childhood trips to the village that the seed for this food memoir sprouted. How could we have so much and yet still not have enough?

A note about the short story “The People of Gehenna” by Tom Olali from translator Richard Prins for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: As a translator of Swahili literature, the texts I find most compelling are the ones that might show something new to the English language. When I first read Tom Olali's novel Watu wa Gehenna, I had the thrilling experience of never knowing what set of rules the author was going to defenestrate next. This particular excerpt often reads like a Socratic dialogue, but the interlocutors form a mind-bending trinity of God, Satan, and Self. Elsewhere, reality turns out to be dream and dream turns out to be reality, the dead are resurrected and the resurrected are put to death, and characters shapeshift like they're the author's imaginary playthings – which, of course, they are! By reveling in the artifice of narrative, I feel Olali reveals a great deal about the artifice of human society and consciousness.

Dalia Elhassan reads “homegoing” for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”. Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.

A note about the short story “My Hairdresser is Dead” from Emelda Nyaradzai Gwitimah for the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: It took me a full 12 months to be able to complete 'My Hairdresser is Dead'. I don't consider myself any type of non-fic writer but my grief needed an outlet and storytelling is cheaper than therapy, right? My hair is woven into my Black womanhood so intrinsically, that the piece was a way to grapple with all those meanings, deal with my new reality and changing hair condition in a cold climate, while paying homage to the woman who'd basically acted as my healer and therapist at some of the most important points in my life.

Elizabeth Mudenyo Reads “mom makes time” for MQR's Spring 2024 issue "African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations". Read the text for this poem on the MQR website.

A note about the poem from Andrea Cohen for MQR's Winter 2024 issue for our Winter 2024 issue: I first saw Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery about twenty-five years ago. That seeing has stayed with me—as has my eighth-grade copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

A note about the poem from Joshua Robbins for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: This poem is one in a book length sequence of antiphonal exchanges between a contemporary Job-like speaker who’s met with a response from a God who is vindictive, lost, stubborn, self-conscious, etc. “Philomela in Texas” was one of those rare poems that settled very quickly once I saw my son twirling in his socks and heard his jeremiad against the Gospel of Texas Pageants and its gender-normative decrees. Haven’t you loved someone so much you would eat them? God’s response to this is simply, “Have this moment, but you know what’s coming.” And of course we do.

A note about the poem from L.A. Johnson for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: After my father died, he was gone but his things were everywhere. Looking around my parents’ house, it was as if he were still alive. His death made the boundaries between the real and the imaginary murkier than ever, and my brain so badly wanted to be tricked—I would see his jacket by the door and think: Oh, he’s come back and this was all a bad dream. That thought would last a moment, then I would realize my mistake and my sorrow would set in again. In grief, the world, as I perceived it, was changed. This poem uses this sense of surreality to explore the domestic space after tragedy.

A note about the poem from Samuel Cheney for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: This poem tracks a culminating series of coincidences. It celebrates the spooky correspondences and recursions the universe sometimes presents to us. The poem turns when the narrator happens upon James Salter’s story “The Destruction of the Goetheanum,” in which the "vast, brooding structure" of the Goetheanum appears as both a photograph and a symbol. A failed writer in Salter’s story is at work on an unfinished novel—“the one great act of his life”––which is also called The Goetheanum. My poem is named in honor of this project.

Note about this poem from Wendy Chen for MQR's Winter 2024 issue: This poem emerged out of my engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous. After reading her texts Dream I Tell You and Hyperdream—from which this poem borrows its title—I was thinking about the relationship between dreams, death, time, and family. At the time, I was trying my hand at keeping a dream journal, and this poem is centered on an actual dream I had after learning about my grandmother's stroke. Dreams for me are often full of emotionally resonant imagery, and I hoped to translate those images onto the page in this poem.

A note from Amy Sailer for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": I started writing about William and Jane Morris just before getting engaged. Their marriage has given me a rich vocabulary to imagine my own. They built a beautiful home together, Red House, which they intended as an artist’s utopia, where they, their family, and their community of friends could create the home’s medieval-inspired interior decoration, but the experiment fell apart within a few years, in part because Jane fell in love with their friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When I visited Red House, the tour guide called it “a house of indecision.” They had so many unfulfilled projects—I could feel their high expectations and the stress it must have caused them.

I had the opportunity to work on the project at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, where I learned that Morris & Company revolutionized nineteenth-century embroidery. The first half of the century was dominated by Berlin crewel work, a style that employs cross-stitch to fill out predetermined grid patterns. Morris & Company popularized “art embroidery,” a more creative technique, using a variety of stitches to create more organic designs. Both styles of embroidery lead to repetition and redundancy, but to my eyes, repetitive cross-stitches look monotonous and mechanical, while the repetitive patterns in a piece of art embroidery like Jane and Jenny Morris’s “Honeysuckle” look joyful. John Ruskin argues in his essay “The Nature of the Gothic” that redundancy is a sign of pleasure—when we enjoy our work, we keep making more of it. Although we don’t know the names of the women who created so much embroidery, I like to think that redundancy serves as a kind of signature.

Teresa Carmody reads an excerpt from their essay, "Moving the Inconsequential Loop: Somatics, Feminisms", for MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights".

Hari Alluri reads his poem, "Slow Time Simmer", from MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights".

Ashwini Bhasi reads her poem, "All Night I Traveled", from the Online Folio of MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights".

Ashwini Bhasi reads her poem, "What did I do today", from the Online Folio of MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights".

Cynthia Ling Lee reads her poem "fatigue" for MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights". Sound composition by Anna Friz.

Derek McPhatter reads his song, "Prayer for a Preistexx Dark", from the Online Folio of MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights".

Lis Sanchez reads her poem, "Miracle of Trout", for MQR's Winter 2023 issue.

Kelsey Zimmerman reads her poem "Not Michigan" from MQR's Winter 2023 issue.

Carl Phillips reads three of his poems, "What Are We for What Are We," "Like So," "On Why I Cannot Promise", for MQR's Winter 2023 issue.

Cassandra Whitaker reads her poem "states" for MQR's Winter 2023 issue.

Susan Azar Porterfield reads her poem, "Alternative Facts" for MQR's Winter 2023 issue.

Les James reads her poem "American Dreams / Wake Up Call", an online exclusive for MQR's Fall 2022 issue 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.

Christine Rhein reads her poem "Pandemic Playground", from MQR's Fall 2022 special issue, 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.

Arnisha Royston reads her poem "Headlines", from MQR'S Fall 2022 special issue 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.

Victoria Stitt reads her poem "coolbaugh township, PA", from MQR's Fall 2022 special issue, 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.

Victoria Stitt reads her poem, "again this week, they killed another child who looked like my brother", for MQR's Fall 2022 special issue, 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.

Jonathan Greenhause reads his poem "At my niece’s birthday party, 1,431 miles north of Guantánamo”, for MQR's Fall 2022 special issue 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.

Gabriella Fee reads their poem, "Dear Boy," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue. 

Lauren Eggert-Crowe reads her poem, "Queen of any world that took me," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue.

Rebecca Levi reads her poem, "Mateo," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue.

Debora Kuan reads her poem, "Reputations, Or After Trying to Imagine My Daughter at 18," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue.

Tyler Moore reads his poem his poem, "Bauhaus," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue.

Ashley Crout reads her poem, "Every Fresh Loss Resurrects All Losses," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue. 

Haro Lee reads her poem, "Carriage," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue.

Asnia Asim reads her poem, "Trees," for MQR's Summer 2022 issue. 

Ahmad Almallah reads his poem, "Border Wisdom," from MQR's Spring 2022 issue.

The Spring 2022 issue of MQR features the poem, "Oud," by Fowziyah Abu Khalid, translated into English by Moneera Al-Ghadeer. In this recording, Moneera Al-Ghadeer reads the poem in English, followed by Fowziyah Abu Khalid reading the poem in the original Arabic.

The Spring 2022 issue of MQR features the poem, "Death, Peppermint Flavoured," by Ashur Ewebi, translated into English by James Byrne and Ashur Etwebi. In this recording, James Byrne reads the poem in English, followed by Ashur Etwebi reading the poem in the original Arabic.

Tarik Dobbs reads their poem, "That July, My Sito Calls from Damascus at Midnight," from MQR's Spring 2022 issue.

K. Eltinaé reads "Breathing Exercise" from MQR's Spring 2022 issue.

Paul Hanna reads their poem, "Sweet Dumpling (fried in oil)," from MQR's Spring 2022 issue.

Yahya Frederickson reads an excerpt from their poem, "Releases," published in MQR's Spring 2022 issue.