Blog / Interviews

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...

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...

Readings from Our Gaza Issue

December 17, 2024 - By Staff

Editor's note: A video reading from some of the contributors to our Gaza issue, with poems in Arabic followed by their English translations. In order of presentation, Maya Abu Al-Hayat, Ibrahim Fawzy, Batool Abu Akleen, Wiam El-Tamami, Muhammed al-Zaqzouq, as translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, Nathalie Handal, Zena K.A. Elhout, and Anam Zafar.

10 Questions for Marguerite Sheffer

December 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Russ Brings all the wrong books to my hospital room, which is tucked into a corner of the birthing center. How was he to know I’d already finished that novel? Back at our house, all my books flounder in inscrutable piles. I hadn’t arranged them to be legible to anyone else. Of course, no one predicts a car accident; we didn’t expect to be T-boned on the way home from Costco, trunk full of perishables.
—from "Wire Nanosecond" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Ever?! One of the very first pieces I wrote, in 5th grade, was a historical fiction story about a girl in, I think, vaguely the 1500s. She was a peasant who worked in a winery and I remember I made her walk...