A note about the work “Excerpts from Skyside” from Stéphanie Ferrat translated by Marissa Davis for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Fall 2024 Translation Issue: I stumbled upon Skyside at a poetry fair in Paris several years ago, and it captivated me from the first page. As a painter as well as a poet, Ferrat imbues her work with meditations on the creative process, touching on both the miracles and the banalities (and the miracles within the banalities) of artmaking. Her language is often tinged with the surrealist, leaping from subject to subject in a kind of textual collage--a challenge, but also a thrill, for me as a translator. Skyside's fearless experimentation, philosophical contemplation, and camaraderie with the natural world sing to me with every read. 

A note about the work "The Easy Part" from Ismael Ramos for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Fall 2024 Translation Issue: Who would want to marry a secondary character?” I found myself wondering one day, as I walked along the river near my parent’s house. The truth is, there were other questions lurking beneath that one. In the era of social media, are we able to generate endless expectations beyond failure? In times of economic precarity, what is a home? Is sharing an apartment really a remedy against solitude? Is it possible to have your own name and personality when your life doesn’t square with the story you’ve created for yourself? Can you write a novel with a squashed identity? Do you have to write to be a writer? Marcos, the protagonist of 'The Easy Part,' is simultaneously odious and tender. He embodies the sort of secondary character no one would want to be. Far from moving along the main storyline, of being solid and attractive (but not in excess), Marcos is a constant reminder that the possibility that nothing will go the way we want is the substance our days are made of. The true heartbeat of his unwritten novel is the disenchantment of the working class in a historical moment when the internet provides daily reminds of what we could be and aren’t. This story is that rock in the shoe.

A note about the work “Mother of Stone” from Terry Ann Thaxton for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue:  I have a photograph of my parents standing next to each other, leaning against our station wagon on one of our numerous and regular camping trips. My father is shirtless, smiling and wearing his bucket hat. My mother is not smiling. I sensed that my parents did not like each other. They did not touch each other. I did not know until years after their deaths many of the reasons their distrust, but my childhood sense was correct. My parents loved their children, but the pretense of their happiness loomed over our lives and haunted me. It seemed to be my father’s mission to take us to every fort in Florida, including Fort Pickens and Castillo de San Marcos. My father stole a brick from Geronimo’s cell at Fort Pickens by putting it on his head under his hat, which he later used when he built the fireplace in our home. Coquina shells were used in the construction of Castillo de San Marcos. Florida sits on limestone. My mother would occasionally smile but only when my father was not present, and her smile seemed, to me, to be behind a wall of stone.

A note about the work “Archival” from Patrycja Humienik for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I wrote this poem (part of my forthcoming book, We Contain Landscapes), in response to Diana Al-Hadid’s exhibit “Archive of Longings” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA in 2021. I was invited to create a workshop in conversation with the work, for which I led participants in movement and writing experiments engaging page and body as archive. Al-Hadid wrote, in the label for one of her sculptures, “I wondered how much of myself I could lose and still be there.” I remain riveted by the question. 

A note about the work “So Like a Waking” from Peter E. Murphy for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: 1. Eight years and almost fifty drafts, writing "So Like a Waking" was a pain in the ass. 2. I couldn’t . . . wouldn’t accept that I was an alcoholic. Bums shitting themselves on a park bench or in the gutter, they were alcoholics, not me. Sure, I woke up on a park bench . . . I woke up in a gutter, but I only peed myself. 3. Drinking was the only thing that made sense to me. Make that poetry and drinking. I loved them both equally. However, drinking was trying to kill me. Poetry was trying to keep me alive. 4. At a writing retreat I led in Spain several years ago, a woman who had just lost her mother said, “I’m sorry. She’s all I can write about.” “Don’t apologize,” I said. “My mother died sixty years ago, and she’s all I can write about.” 5. I think of my high school years as Early-Derelict Period. I trudged from bookstore to bookstore in Greenwich Village, brown-bagging a quart of Ballantine Ale, searching for Ginsberg’s Howl one week, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind the next. Then I graduated to Mid-Derelict Period. Then Late-Derelict Period when I hit the proverbial rock bottom in a flophouse in Wales. 6. “Hi! My name is Peter, and I’m . . . um . . . well . . . you know . . . .”

A note about the work “Ideal Customers” from Charlie Sorrenson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: Never was fashion more fraught for me than in the early days of transition. Clothing stores became a site of both potential power (here was the quickest and most effective means of signaling to the world how I wanted to be perceived) and acute discomfort. I wanted to explore this tension via the setting of a clothing store catering to transmascs, in the days before online shopping allowed us to experiment and make mistakes from the safety of our bedrooms. And I wanted to place into this environment someone wrestling with how they can and ought to express their own gender. What rules—of gender, of consumption, of service—govern our behavior? When we break them, what else is threatened?

A note about the work “In Defense of Aunt Léonie” from Jodie Noel Vinson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 YEAR issue: If you knew me in my early twenties, we probably had a conversation about Proust. I spent nine months consumed by his novel In Search of Lost Time, which can sound snobbish or academic but for me was an immersive, intimate relationship, a beautiful secret I shared with others passionate about his prose, or who also harbored an obsession with the past. When I turned forty, I returned to Proust. I was at that time also returning to myself after living with chronic illness for three years. His book still had its hold on me, but I was noticing new things. This time around, my way into the novel was through the character of Léonie Octave. Like others, I had, on a first read, taken the aunt to be a comical hypochondriac, obsessed with her own suffering. Now, prone and pitiful on her sickbed, she appealed to my sympathy. What would happen, I wondered, if we were to take her complaints seriously: to start from a place of belief, rather than doubt? Where did that immediate impulse to disbelieve another person’s pain come from? These questions led me to read her character through a lens of compassion, humanity, and empathy, and, eventually, to write “In Defense of Aunt Léonie.”

A note about the work “Once I Was Beautiful Now I Am Myself” from Leila Chatti for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: First, the poem’s title is a line borrowed from an Anne Sexton poem. I wrote this poem in a period when I thought I wasn’t writing; rather, I felt I was reacting, or perhaps channeling. I was at a point in my life where I felt both very sad and very powerless. Because I felt I had little control over my life, I became accustomed to letting myself be carried along, and then I began to write that way—carried on a current of the subconscious. This felt strangely freeing. I was turning into someone I didn’t recognize, in those years, or maybe, more truthfully, into someone I didn’t want to recognize. The self I’d been avoiding, the uglier parts in all this disruption dislodged and brought to the surface. This poem arose from the mix of wonder and horror I experienced trying to really look at myself, without looking away.

A note about "It's Important I Remember that the Enemy Is Always Within” from Cortney Lamar Charleston for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: In ways established by historical precedent, the United States of America is an empire, but I speculate most Americans disagree. Empire has an appropriately negative connotation—a system of domination and exploitation spearheaded by tyrants—and thus feels an unfair description of the America in its citizenry’s imagination: the nation that toppled fascism and saved the free world, the longest-standing democracy on Earth. Yet that very America maintains military outposts around the globe; holds foreign countries as “territories”; has built itself into a military and economic superpower while squatting on the ancestral lands of Indigenous nations. My poem, “It’s Important I Remember That the Enemy Is Always Within—,” buckles under these truths, even as it orbits the death of a brutal, criminal man behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks: Osama bin Laden. Undoubtedly, America (meaning the state) and bin Laden were enemies to one another, but what was bin Laden to an ordinary American citizen? An enemy, certainly, though more a conceptual entity than an actual person, a grainy face and voice to slot into our psyche and induce acceptance of violence and dispossession. Enemies are easily made—thus easily replaced—because of our empathic deficiencies. U.S. forces killed bin Laden in 2011, celebrated across the country as justice served, yet our occupation continued another decade. Our soldiers have finally returned and await their next deployment somewhere far away or, perhaps, closer to home: wherever a new enemy is invented that Empire points to as justification for its actions.

A note about the poem “For Girls Who Talk Too Much at Lunch” from Steffi Sin for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: My poetry collection For the Ones Who Grew Up In Hong Kong Style Cafés is comprised of twenty-six sonnets, all set in San Francisco Chinatown’s now-closed ABC Café & Restaurant. Each poem is a vignette of a meal the narrator experiences, and the use of Anglicized Cantonese represents the fluidity of language for bilingual speakers, playing with Cantonese-English rhymes and homophones. “For Girls Who Talk Too Much at Lunch” is about the disconnect between the narrator, who is trying to comprehend the violent history of Chinese in America she’s learned in school, and her immigrant father, who doesn’t have the mental capacity to discuss these issues because he’s preoccupied with the family’s financial struggles. The poem is titled as a commentary about the double-standard for daughters. Oftentimes, when women speak up, the people around them don’t listen, and their words are dismissed as drivel, as foolish, and they’re told they’re disconnected from reality. Education is perceived as a road to success, towards the illusion of the American Dream, but when women use their education to question the norm, education then becomes an instrument spoiling their minds. The lines that break from the established rhyme scheme then represents the narrator’s persistence in challenging these constraints.

A note about the short story “Diaspora Café” from Vince Omni for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I spend a lot of time in coffee shops, or at least in the genre of coffee shops that has come to characterize American culture: big, busy, expensive. They are great places for working and for people watching. They are also, by and large, very homogeneous. “The Diaspora Café” is my humble attempt to remake that genre from a Black perspective in my hometown of Denver, CO, where rampant gentrification has displaced black and brown people.

A note about the poem “13 Ways of Nepantla” from Fernando Trujillo for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 issue: I had been reading Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, and I kept finding myself back at “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which was in his first collection. I was struck by the austerity of the poem, in contrast to other works by Stevens. And I kept returning to the second canto, “I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.” I thought of myself and my community, how so many of us are of two, or even three minds, within the same tree, so to speak. We have our indigenous mind, our Caucasian mind, and our mestizo mind, cutting across both México and the US for me and many in my community. This also, linguistically, applies to my poetic lineage; Neruda en español inspired me as much as Whitman in English as a teenager, Dickinson as much as Lorca. This all contributed to my mindset when I started writing “13 Ways.” Of course my poem is not as tightly structured or imagistic as Stevens’. I’m writing more from sound than image. I’m also attempting to place myself, my experiences, and my family at the center of a poetic lineage, hence all the grabbing from other poets. All-in-all, what I’m trying to do is imagine myself in the song of “América America,” and more than just imagining, writing a place for myself in it.

Saddiq Dzukogi reads "Bakandamiya XI." from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Glen Retief reads his fiction piece "Ghost Fish" from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Chika Unigwe reads her fiction piece "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" from MQR''s Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Matthew Shenoda reads his poem "Capitalism's Migration" from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Afua Ansong reads her poem "Light in Exile" from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Shahilla Shariff reads her poem "Exile" from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani. Photography in the video appears courtesy of Shahilla Shariff.

Leye Adenle reads "The House of Oluawo" from MQR's Spring 2024 special issue African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, guest edited by Chris Abani.

Dalia Elhassan reads “everything, everywhere, all at once” 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.

Afua Ansong reads “Armor of Light” 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 poem “Exile” from Shahilla Shariff for the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: An object from ordinary life—an unusual chocolate wrapper—was the aperture which transported me to my African childhood and to writing “Exile.” Rooted in memory, a series of seemingly disparate fragments were animated by unexpected encounters with songs, photographs, words and vistas. After countless iterations and experimentations, the images and ideas blurred and somehow assembled into a poem.

A note about the short story “The Last Voyage of Ibn Batt​​ûta” from Amira Géhanne Khalfallah for MQR’s Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”:   Onboard The Amsterdam or Ibn Battûta’s Last Voyage follows Marouane, a 22-year old Moroccan man, from his hometown of Tangier to the far regions of the world he crosses unexpectedly in his quest for survival and freedom. It all begins when the young man, with dreams of reaching Europe, secretly joins the crew of a boat. But the Amsterdam, the Dutch warship where he hides, is on its way to Syria. During the Mediterranean crossing, Marouane is discovered by Ernst, the ship's captain, with whom he develops a relationship that neither of them fully understand. Both are soon initiated into an entirely new way of viewing the world. This novel is particularly attentive to the phenomenon of radicalization. It is also draws heavily from my investigative journalistic work. For twenty years, I reported on North Africa and Middle East. This experience allowed me to dig deeper into the question of why young men are drawn to ISIS. At the same time, this book is far from being a journalistic report; it is a story that questions identities, the meaning of exile as well as the nature of religion, and their relation to the world. It is a contemporary tragedy, the one we live everyday, through the media if we are lucky. It is the story of an ongoing war that might seem far away, but which hits us a little more every day until it reaches us in the most intimate places.

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.

Read the text for this piece on the MQR website. Note about the poem from Noah Arhm Choi  for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": While gender affirming care has singularly been one of the best things that has happened in my life, it has also meant that going to the Korean spa has no longer become an option with their binary locker rooms and my fears around discomfort and safety. This poem speaks to the ways that I yearn for queerness and Koreanness to be able to exist in the same space, and how even the best things aren't necessarily black or white, all good or all evil. I think this poem, too, is a way to speak to the ways that binary notions of categorization often fail to encompass the fullness of our humanity and our experiences.

Rachel Nelson reads "Diseases of American Slavery (the desire)" for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions". Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.

Rachel Nelson reads "Diseases of American Slavery (the earth)" for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions". Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.

Read the text for this piece on the MQR website. Note from Cindy Juyoung Ok for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": Source text combined and choreographed here includes studies, labels, and idioms.

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.

Read the text for this piece on the MQR website. Note about the poem from Melissa Range for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": In the decade I've spent working on my poetry collection Printer's Fist, which is about the abolitionist movement in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, I have dug through archives both digital and physical. One of my areas of investigation has been print culture within the movement, and thus I've done a great deal of research on nineteenth century abolitionist newspapers. Enslavers also used newspapers for their own sinister purposes, of course. The sheer number of "Ran Away from the Subscriber" advertisements in eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers is staggering and sobering. In my research, I looked at many of these advertisements, as well, finding in them important stories of resistance and self-emancipation. There's a great database called Freedom on the Move if you'd like to learn more. I first learned about the girl identified as Juno (most certainly not her real name) from an article by Karen Cook Bell, “Black Women’s Fugitivity in Colonial America,” published on the Black Perspectives section of the African American Intellectual History Society. Using the database Newspapers.com, I was able to find the original runaway ad for Juno, published in the South Carolina Gazette, July 28, 1733. All italicized language in the poem is from this advertisement. Again following Bell’s lead, I consulted the database Slave Voyages for information on the voyages of the slave ship Speaker, captained by Henry Flower. The “place of purchase” for the Speaker’s 1733 voyage is listed in this database as Cabinda, which in the current day is a state in Angola.  I also learned from this same Gazette issue that the Speaker departed, en route to London, two weeks after it had docked in Charleston. The Speaker made additional slaving voyages after this one, according to the Slave Voyages database. While I was working on the poem, it fell somewhat naturally into the form of a mirror poem (I'd been reading a lot of Natasha Trethewey and Adrienne Su, two amazing practitioners of that form). I think the form fits the themes of journeying and reversals that are present in the poem.

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.