Recently added articles from Michigan Quarterly Review:
ON LITERARY CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION: AUTOPSY FOR A CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
Jul 01, 2008; Johnson, Charles ... I believe it would be a tremendous mistake for me to come to the University of Michigan and deliver one of the Hopwood Lectures in the distinguished presence of writer Nicholas Delbanco and not speak about the late novelist John Gardner, whom we shared as a mentor more than thirty years ago. I ...
DIVINE AFFLATUS
Jul 01, 2008; Gillette, Jane ... When Johnson's son was eight, he ran out into the street after a ball and died instantly: hit by a car. A terrible tragedy for the family. Johnson had two daughters and a wife he felt estranged from even before the accident. A few years later, Johnson's unassuageable grief finally precipitated ...
DECIDING TO STEAL
Jul 01, 2008; Soto, Gary ... I needed the eraser heads, Those little turbans for pencils, For I was poor at math, poor at drawing, And poor of dimes and nickels. At the blessed moment when I decided to steal, The eraser heads sat in a small container, With the pencils, the ...
TALKING IN OUR PAJAMAS: A CONVERSATION WITH SANDRA CISNEROS ON FINDING YOUR VOICE, FEAR OF HIGHWAYS, TACOS, TRAVEL, AND THE NEED FOR PEACE IN THE WORLD
Jul 01, 2008; Behar, Ruth ... I was back in Ann Arbor after a stay of several months in Mexico when I met Sandra Cisneros. Her two major publications at the time were My Wicked Wicked Ways, a collection of feisty poems, and House on Mango Street, a novella about an introspective girl coming of age in Mexican Chicago. She had ...
IN THE FIELD OF MUSICAL DIRECTION
Jul 01, 2008; Hicok, Bob ... Looking up risible yesterday I learned ritardando. In dictionaries one word points at a gaggle of other words like tag. Meaning is a game of being it and then we get tired and fall down in a heap of keeping each other warm through the cold night. I need ...
FLAW
Jul 01, 2008; Hicok, Bob ... Hands, the fit of them, to the neck. God's making an end for the arm, murder, His, forgive me, my pronoun, my rage, if in practice I lift them to the window, morning's jet mirror, who, and what you did, the cracked bell within, is not evil, but to ring ...
UPON RECEIVING MY MOTHER'S WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENT
Jul 01, 2008; Fox, Diana ... By now you might be tired of changing your name. You erase the past, systematically kill the pets, sell the heirlooms. I was always quiet in your presence; a shade dumb, you thought; nevertheless, salable goods for the amateur pimp: a ...
CLEMENCY
Jul 01, 2008; Fox, Diana ... We fall asleep in our clothes at least, behind me, you seem to sleep with spines as rigid as cadets' at attention, pelvises tectonic plates scraping, until your fingers dance down my waist and grant permission to drop the charade. I clench your ...
from NOCTURNES
Jul 01, 2008; Landau, Deborah ... the night has no cracks nothing haunts the highways the president speaks from the big lit screens but he speaks to no one all night the Hudson river runs blank and gray beneath the window for someone else to see it no one ...
FROZEN HEART: GROWING UP WITH "THE SNOW QUEEN"
Jul 01, 2008; Lieberman, Lisa ... It was one of those glass splinters from the magic mirror, and poor Kay had now got it into his heart. It did not hurt any longer, but it was still there. Soon his heart would become hard and cold like a lump of ice. Even this tiny splinter had the power to make him see as evil everything that ...
THE LOST FATHER IN DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Jul 01, 2008; Fix, Charlene ... What we can't see is more important than what we can see. -Arthur Miller to Enoch Brater1 Recent revelations about Arthur Miller's estrangement from his Down Syndrome son, Daniel,2 rebound like a prophecy Miller himself made early in his career when, in Death of a Salesman, he ...
"WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR IS AN IMAGE OF OURSELVES": A CONVERSATION WITH ARTHUR MILLER
Jul 01, 2008; Centola, Steven R ... This interview with Arthur Miller took place on August 9, 2001, in the sweltering heat of the hottest day that Connecticut and the Northeast would experience that summer. The weather-beaten thermometer at the neighboring Woodbury, Connecticut, mechanic's garage registered 104 degrees that day ....
TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT A HOPPER
Jul 01, 2008; Stanton, Joseph ... Edward Hopper. By Carol Troyen, Judith Barter, Janet Comey, Elliot Bostwick Davis, and Ellen Roberts. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2007. Pp. 263. $65 hardcover, $45 paper. Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper. By Walter Wells. London: Phaidon Press, 2007. Pp. 240. $69.95 ...
WAITING FOR Z
Jul 01, 2008; Allman, John ... In his little house attached to mine, we cut each other's hair. There's not much of it, both of us balding so that only the hair along the sides keeps growing, though I still have a little on top. We don't talk about my wife and her postcards. Next stop, Trieste! She signs herself Z. I trim him ...
WHIZ KIDS AT EIGHTY (II)*
Jul 01, 2008; Gilbert, Roger ... A Worldly Country. By John Ashbery. New York: Ecco, 2007. Pp. 76. $23.95. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. By Adrienne Rich. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Pp. 108. $23.95. No two living American poets present a starker contrast than John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich. Ashbery's ...