Blog

The Last Song of the World

January 21, 2025 - By Christos Kalli

A Review of Joseph Fasano's The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024)

Like a deep breath, like a flower that blooms against the relentless elements of an inhospitable season, Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World begins with “Sudden Hymn in Winter,” a short but powerful poem, functioning almost as the collection’s own epigraph:

What if, after years
of trial,
a love should come
and lay a hand upon you
and say,
this late
your life is not a crime

In the simple language with which he...

10 Questions for Marissa Davis

January 13, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

This morning, something in my doubt dissolves.
The footprint or the transparency of floors.
The wells open up. Sometimes, the wells close again.
The added materials haven’t allowed the decision anything.
Footsteps must swell, take up bone. The wells must rise.
—from Marissa Davis' translation of Stéphanie Ferrat's "Skyside" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
Technically, one of the first pieces I translated was my own! Before I began translating others’ work, I would sometimes translate my own poems into French and back into English as a combined revision (of the poem) and vocabulary-building (of my French) exercise. I first began...

New Beers Resolutions

January 10, 2025 - By Marsha Bryant

Are you in a beer slump, do you steer
Clear of tastes unlike those you hold dear?
Well, I have a solution:
New Beers Resolutions!
I tried it; there’s nothing to fear.

1.
If you like a clean lager (no frills),
Here’s a beer that might just fit your bill:
For Rebellion Red Lager
Has a touch of swagger
With sweetness and crispness instilled.

2.
Beer for breakfast? Why not go for sweet
Instead of a savory treat?
Cinnamon Bacon Roll
Just might be your beer goal—
Tastes like pastry that’s fresh off the sheet.

3.
If a pourable Reese’s you seek,
Then you’re in for a...

The View From Gaza Launch Event

January 10, 2025 - By Staff

On December 6th, 2024, the Massachusetts Review hosted a launch event for our issue The View from Gaza. The evening included brief notes of welcome from outgoing editor Jim Hicks, incoming editor Britt Rusert, guest editor Michel Moushabeck,...

10 Questions for Michael Lee

January 6, 2025 - By Franchesca Viaud

There is an old joke I heard one winter,
one popular among the farmers
from Trøndelag to Nord-Norge:

two deer run along the railroad.
One says to the other, we have to get off
these tracks and into the forest.
—from Michael Lee's "Norway's Iron Road," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece of any significance (we’ll leave the middle school poems about elves and such out of this) was a poem called The Taking of Lead, (it would become my first published poem in 2013). I was living in Bergen Norway in 2012 and was very sick with Mono. I couldn’t leave the house and spent every day just reading and writing poems...