MQR Sound – Michigan Quarterly Review

MQR Sound


Some things are better seen and heard. Listen to author-recorded performances of poems from recent MQR issues.

Winter 2025 | Sanjana Thakur reads "My Left Hand, Unholy" MQR Sound

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 workshop, constructing the story around that red onion and one line: "Death is a woman's duty." I tend to be a somewhat frantic, deadline-motivated writer, so this whole story was written by pulling two all-nighters two days before it was due, and while I did revise it after receiving feedback from my professors and peers, it didn't substantially change form. The hardest thing to pin down in this story was the name! It started out as "Antyesti" which means "Last Sacrifice" (referring to Hindu funeral rites), then became "Life Cycles", then "Bodily Fluids", then "Water of the Womb", and finally, thanks to a classmate's suggestion, "My Left Hand, Unholy". I hope you enjoy it. 
  1. Winter 2025 | Sanjana Thakur reads "My Left Hand, Unholy"
  2. Winter 2025 | Leyla Loued-Khenissi reads "Blue Skies, Birdsong"
  3. Winter 2025 | Martín Espada Reads "Insult"
  4. Fall 2024 | Marissa Davis Reads "Excerpts from Skyside"
  5. Fall 2024 | Jacob Rogers Reads "The Easy Part"
  6. Summer 2024 | Terry Ann Thaxton Reads "Mother of Stone"
  7. Summer 2024 | Patrycja Humienik Reads "Archival"
  8. Summer 2024 | Peter E. Murphy Reads "So Like a Waking"
  9. Summer 2024 | Charlie Sorrenson Reads "Ideal Customers"
  10. Summer 2024 | Jodie Noel Vinson Reads “In Defense of Aunt Léonie"
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