We celebrate Toni Morrison’s birthday all week. Here are her words from the Archives. Toni Morrison’s speech “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” was given as the Turner Lecture on Human Values October 7th, 1988 at the University of Michigan, and appeared in
“In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade,” reads the final line of “Checkpoints,” a poem in Ilya Kaminsky’s forthcoming book Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019). In a lyric world uniquely his own, deafness and its sister sound, silence, become the central tropes of Kaminsky’s book-length
“Negative Capability,” by Yusef Komunyakaa, appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Summer 1999 issue. We bring you this poem from The MQR Archives. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ The honeysuckle vines are certain They’ll be here tomorrow morning, Unhushed scent reaching into next month, As I rest the scythe against a
“Worshippers,” by Caitlin Kindervatter-Clark, appears in the Winter 2019 Issue of MQR. After half a lifetime of unsuccessfully trying to control my drinking, I decided to surrender the whole endeavor and quit. In the wake of this decision, my ego underwent a partial collapse. Drinking had
“Chapman’s Heart,” by Michael Byers, appears in the Winter 2019 Issue of MQR. It was a new program, long-argued over, newly implemented. Before a president, any president, could launch the weapons that would kill a billion humans, he, or she, would have to murder Chapman and
