MQR is delighted to announce a new project with Wolverine Press, with these words from Press Director Fritz Swanson: _______________________________________________________________________ Wolverine Press is pleased to partner with Michigan Quarterly Review on the first of what we hope will be many collaborative editions. As a sign
I must have been about ten when my mother and I were called into a cubicle at the American embassy in India, where we had traveled from Iran as part of our visa application, and in light of the absence of diplomatic relations between Tehran
Roja Chamankar’s Dying in a Mother Tongue is a poetry collection on the brink of loss, violence, coming into language, adulthood, and emigration. First written in 2009 (in Persian), when Chamankar was about to leave Tehran for France, Dying in a Mother Tongue is first
My mother picks up the pestle and mortar and does to saffron what the clerics have done to her country/ pours in steaming water till the liquid in the bowl becomes the Caspian swallowing the sun/ it smells like a home I have not returned
Digging through trash, I smell the whiskey on Shamlu’s breath. It’s not so strange. He once stood here recording the rhythm of the butcher’s cleaver like a journalist for Satan’s newspaper. In the ash of lilies and the charred remains of tortured canaries, I open
