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Michigan Quarterly Review
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Poems and Prose from the pages of the Michigan Quarterly Review

  1. MAR 26

    Winter 2026 | Jesus De La Torre Reads "Sunday At Mt. Carmel"

    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 country and guarantee a safe return. Perhaps with this story I wanted to write about someone who could attend their loved one’s burial, but, despite proximity, had lost any connection to them, there’d been a rupture not related to distance. But also, I used to drive by the funeral home in the story a couple of times a month. Perhaps I was simply passing by one day and imagined my protagonist there and wondered what he was doing there and how he was holding up.

    9 min

  2. MAR 26

    Winter 2026 | Mai Serhan Reads "I Can Imagine It for Us"

    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 Palestinian in the diaspora, born and acculturated elsewhere. I rarely saw myself reflected in literature. I never threw a rock at a tank nor harvested olives, or held the key to an ancestral home. My markers were different: airports, time zones and international calling codes were what connected me to my Palestinian family. My geography is fragmented, and I wanted to bring my dislocation to the page, to bear witness and place my testimony on record. I also knew there was a story here that hadn’t been told. As far as I know, no narratives follow a Palestinian in China, where the main plot unfolds. Setting the story there pushed the theme of alienation to an extreme and allowed me to explore inheritance, severance and erasure in ways that closely reflected the story I wanted to tell. But I wrote it for another reason too: to feel less alone. There are more than seven million Palestinians in the diaspora whose lives echo this distance and fragmentation. Someone once said that a good story is like a handshake across the ocean. I wanted to extend my hand, to make others feel seen and to invite them to imagine alongside me.

    6 min

  3. MAR 26

    Winter 2026 | Sophie Ezzell Reads "Fear It"

    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 means of showing that abusers aren’t always the people you expect. And of course then Hamlet found its way in there, as Hamlet always does.

    10 min

  4. 08/25/2025

    Summer 2025 | Marcela Sulak Reads Talismans

    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 imagine married love in which the wife responds to the joys and challenges of living with her husband through the language of talismans.

    2 min

  5. 08/01/2025

    Summer 2025 | Leah Falk reads "There were no poets of motherhood"

    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 prestigious university, and it was there that a well-known scholar and critic contended that there were “no poets of motherhood.” The claim seemed absurd to me even then, since I had been reading contemporary poets like Kim Addonizio, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Zucker, and so many others who use their motherhood as a touchstone. My memory of her talk was among the first in which I realized that I could have an opinion that differed from someone so senior, and have evidence for it, too. In this poem I explore the imagined boundaries some might erect between scholarly and artistic pursuits and domestic and menial work, and what the cost of such borders might be to both art and labor.

    2 min

  6. 07/16/2025

    Summer 2025 | Deema Shehabi reads "Sun Theater Sonnet"

    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 differentiation that can occur. It took me years to understand my memories as distinct from hers. What remains, however, is nature’s solace as a backdrop for memories, both hers and, in turn, mine.

    2 min

  7. 06/18/2025

    Spring 2025 | Ezza Ahmed Reads "War is always silent until it's done"

    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 to take shape. I have a fascination with looking at the things they packed with them, items they thought they could not live without or wouldn’t find anywhere else. I wanted to see what items they treated as “ingredients” for a fresh start. Though, what I found most interesting was that in all the accounts that were shared with me, what you want to exit from always weasels its way in.

    1 min

  8. 06/12/2025

    Spring 2025 | Anni Liu Reads "Foreshadow Work"

    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 therapy, especially around the alienation of having been an alien. Some of the language in the poem is borrowed from therapy, and some of it is punny and playful, which is maybe an homage to Harryette Mullen and especially her incredible book Sleeping with the Dictionary. I was also happily surprised to arrive at the aspirational ending that remixes the famous line attributed to Terence.

    1 min
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About

Poems and Prose from the pages of the Michigan Quarterly Review

Information

  • Creator
    Michigan Quarterly Review
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    142
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Michigan Quarterly Review
  • Show Website
    MQR Sound