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Front Cover by Anna Schulett
Just a Rumor (detail) 2010
Photograph: John Solem

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Volume 51, Issue 4

SOUND BITES are not the first thing you'll think of when you read the words "Immanuel Kant." Yet the sage of Königsberg could on occasion turn a phrase, Most quotable, perhaps, his cosmic self-salutation: "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasin admiration and awe. . .the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." If we can believe Beckett, it took the advent of psychoanalysis to chop this down to size. "The stars are undoubtedly superb," answered Freud.

But what the heck is a star anyway? A "mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace"? So sang John and John from everyone's favorite nerdrock band—until, that is, they didn't. "Forget that song/They got it wrong!" So the tune was changed and the home star retaged "a miasma of incandescent plasma." Friable is the rock upon science built.

Yet each nighttime navigator straihtening his bearings under the pole star also reasserts the Ptolemaic world order: "an ever-fixed mark/That looks on tempests and is never shaken;/It is a star to every wandering bark." Was there ever a writer without a personal pantehon, without constellations of immortals to guide her every move? "Love is not love/ That alters when it alteration finds." You want stars? We give you stars. Three Nobels: Bellows, Brodsky, and Singer, as Jules Chametzky found them. We show you the award-winning public art of Anna Schuleit, in her own words, and in the making. And the rarest of treasures: letters from J.D. Salinger to a teenage Deirdre Bonifaz—more proof that we need our stars to guide us. Izet Sarajlić, an author that every Yugoslav kid once had to learn by heart, sings his daughter into the world in one poem and foresees his country's demise in another. Maryse Condé gives us a how-to manual that deconstructs ethnic and gender pigeonholing. Sometimes our stars talk back.

And then there is the MR tribute to the Black Stars of Ghana, who gave us all such a glorious ride this past summer: three stories that offer African perspectives on the world's favorite game. Perhaps youth across the globe will soon wear jerseys sporting the names of Devi, Mabanckou, and Waberi—not just Drogba, Messi, and Xavi.

Of course, any self-respecting literary rag must be astrologer as well as astronomer. In your future we see a host of newer names as well: Aracelis Girmay's potent dreamspeech, Fatima Rashid's tale of inherited devastation, Matthew Eck's war survivor nightmare, the Hagar of Amal al-Jubouri, and, impossible to forget, Gary Amdahl's wonderfullly Wobbly fairy tale. Plenty of moral law in that bunch. And the nights are long this time of year, so more's the time for reading. By starlight.


Entries

poetry

This Morning the Small Bird Brought a Message

By Aracelis Girmay

poetry

Bird

By Gretchen Primack

poetry

Tamara

By Izet Sarajlic

translation

Tamara

Jim Hicks

nonfiction

Joseph Brodsky

By Jules Chametzky

fiction

Somewhere Near the Beginning of a Match

By Abdourahman A. Waberi

translation

Somewhere Near the Beginning of a Match

Carolyn Shread

fiction

We Will Win the World Cup 2010

By Alain Mabanckou

translation

We Will Win the World Cup 2010

Helen Dickinson

fiction

The Clan of Ali Babas

By Ananda Devi

translation

The Clan of Ali Babas

Jim Hicks

fiction

It Takes Two Hands to Clap

By Fatima Rashid

nonfiction

Isaac Bashevis Singer

By Jules Chametzky

nonfiction

How to Become a So-Called Caribbean Woman Writer: A User's Manual

By Maryse Condé

translation

How to Become a So-Called Caribbean Woman Writer: A User's Manual

Dawn Fulton

fiction

Most at Rest

By Eson Kim

poetry

American Girl

By Kimalisa Kaczinski

fiction

The Inside Scoop

By Phyllis Rudin

nonfiction

Wonder Spot

By Krista Eastman

fiction

from The Scale of Maps

By Belén Gopegui

translation

from The Scale of Maps

Mark Shafer

art

Just a Rumor

By Anna Schuleit

poetry

Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation

By Amal al-Jubouri

translation

Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation

Rebecca Gayle Howell

fiction

Fucking the Mermaid

By Matthew Eck

fiction

738

By David Yost

poetry

How Wars Begin

By Izet Sarajlic

translation

How Wars Begin

Jim Hicks

poetry

Panel on Borderland

By Eric Weinstein

nonfiction

Saul Bellow

By Jules Chametzky

poetry

Moriah

By Collier Nogues

fiction

We Whistled While We Worked

By Gary Amdahl

poetry

When I Lived with a Stalinist in the Village

By Colette Inez

poetry

Quiet Evening

By Jennifer Habel

nonfiction

Letters from Salinger

By Deirdre Bonifaz

poetry

The Republic of Mania

By Jane Barnes

poetry

51

By Michael Snediker

translation

The Clan of Ali Babas

Florentine Bambara

translation

Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation

Husam Qaisi

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Jim Hicks

This Morning the Small Bird Brought a Message
from the Other Side, a poem by Aracelis Girmay

Bird, a poem by Gretchen Primack

Tamara, a poem by Izet Sarajlic,
translated by Jim Hicks

Joseph Brodsky, a portrait by Jules Chametzky

Somewhere Near the Beginning of the Match,
a story by Abdourahman A. Waberi,
translated by Carolyn Shread

We Will Win the World Cup 2010,
a story by Alain Mabanckou,
translated by Helen Dickinson

The Clan of Ali Babas, a story by Ananda Devi,
translated by Florentine Bambara and Jim Hicks

It Takes Two Hands to Clap, a story by Fatima Rashid

Isaac Bashevis Singer, a portrait by Jules Chametzky

How to Become a So-Called Caribbean Woman Writer:
A User's Manual, an essay by Maryse Condé, translated by Dawn Fulton

Most at Rest, a story by Eson Kim

American Girl, a poem by Kimalisa Kaczinski

The Inside Scoop, a story by Phyllis Rudin

Wonder Spot, an essay by Krista Eastman

From The Scale of Maps,
a novel excerpt by Belén Gopegui,
translated by Mark Shafer

Just a Rumor, art by Anna Schuleit

Hagar before the Occupation, Hagar After
the Occupation, poems by Amal al-Jubouri,
translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Husam Qaisi

Fucking the Mermaid, a story by Matthew Eck

Mautam, a story by David Yost

How Wars Begin, a poem by Izet Sarajlic,
translated by Jim Hicks

Panel on Borderland, a poem by Eric Weinstein

Saul Bellow, a portrait by Jules Chametzky

Moriah, a poem by Collier Nogues

We Whistled While We Worked, a story by Gary Amdahl

When I Lived with a Stalinist in the Village,
a poem by Colette Inez

Quiet Evening, a poem by Jennifer Habel

Letters from Salinger, an essay by Deirdre Bonifaz

The Republic of Mania, a poem by Jane Barnes

Attic, a poem by Michael Snediker

Contributors

AMAL AL-JUBOURI, a native of Iraq, is the author of five collections of poetry, including Wine from Wounds (1986); Words, Set Me Free! (1994); Enheduanna, Priestess of Exile (1999); 99 Veils (2003); and Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation (2008), which is also forthcoming in English. In 1997, she took asylum in Germany, after having been listed first on Uday Hussein s list of renegade Iraqi writers, and was the first Iraqi writer to return to Baghdad, two days after the fall of the regime. The founder and editor-in-chief of al-Diwan, the first and only Arab-German literary magazine, she is president of the East- West Diwan German Cultural Foundation and acts as Cultural Counselor for the Yemen Embassy in Berlin.

GARY AMDAHL is the author of Visigoth and I Am Death. He lives in California.

FLORENTINE W. BAMBARA, an international student from Burkina Faso, West Africa, is a former student at the University of Ouagadougou with a B.A. in English. She recently graduated from Smith College with a diploma in American Studies and a master's in education. She is currently working with a nonprofit educational organization in Mississippl.

JANE BARNES, born in Brooklyn, grew up in Northern California. She graduated from Georgia State College in Spanish and Russian languages, and received an M.A. in poetry and fiction from Boston University's Writing Program. She co-edited the Boston literary magazine Dark Horse. The recipient of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize and an Urban Arts fiction award, her short stories and poems have been published in over fifty journals and anthologies, including Brooklyn Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, and Harvard Review. "Republic of Mania" is from her manuscript The In-Between: Selected Poems 1982-2007. She lives in New York City, and has taught at CUNY, NYU, and elsewhere.

DEIRDRE BONIFAZ is a writer and artist whose recent work "The Refugees Who Came to Our Farm" appeared in The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile. Born in New York City, her early childhood was spent amidst artists, musicians, and writers in Woodstock, NY, before her parents settled in Massachusetts. She attended Bennington College, studied at the Sorbonne, and was at MIT's Center for International Studies before her marriage to Cristóbal Bonifaz.They moved to Khartoum. The culmination of her work with UNICEF and Head Start resulted in her creation of a unique arts organization, Artisans Cooperative, which for twenty years made visible and significant changes in rural communities from the Deep South to Appalachia and beyond. She now lives in Conway, Massachusetts.

JULES CHAMETZKY retired from the UMass English Department in 2004, after a stint as Guest Professor (for the second time) at Humboldt University in Germany in 2003, where his wife, Anne Halley, also taught a Bilingual Poetry Workshop. The selections in this issue are the first two of more than thirty essays on Jewish writers that he has encountered over fifty years.

MARYSE CONDÉ, Professor Emerita of French at Columbia University, is a Guadeloupean novelist, playwright, and critic. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her recent works include a tribute to her grandmother, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (translated as Victoire: My Mother's Mother by Richard Philcox), and the novel Les belles ténébreuses.

Born in Mauritius, ANANDA DEVI is the author of numerous novels, of which La vie de Joséphin le fou, Indian Tango, and Le sari vert were published by Gallimard. Her Eve et ses décombres won a number of literary awards, most notably the Cinq Continents de Francophonie prize.

HELEN DICKINSON is the translator of a children's book and of several short stories. Her most recent translations have appeared or are upcoming in World Literature Today and Words Without Borders. Her work has also been read at French Night at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York.

KRISTA EASTMAN's literary essays have appeared in New Letters, Witness, and The Briar Cliff Review. She lives and writes in Wisconsin.

MATTHEW ECK is the author of the novel The Farther Shore. He was recently selected as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" writers to watch. Among other honors his novel was the recipient of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Society of Midland Authors Fiction Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and first runner-up for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri and is a fiction editor for Pleiades. He lives in Kansas City. 

DAWN FULTON is associate professor of French at Smith College. Her book on the novels of Maryse Condé, Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism, was published in 2008 by the University of Virginia Press.

ARACELIS GIRMAY is the author of Teeth, a collection of poems published by Curbstone Press in 2007, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was nominated for a Connecticut Book Award. Her collage-based picture book, Changing, Changing: Story and Collages, was published by George Braziller in 2005. A recipient of fellowships from the Watson and Jerome Foundations, Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow and serves on the board of the Acentos Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches community writing workshops there and in the Bronx. She also teaches in Drew University's low residency MFA Program and at Queens College. Girmay is Hampshire College's 2010 writer-in-residence.

BELÉN GOPEGUI burst onto the Spanish literary scene in 1993, bowling over critics with her masterful debut, La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps], which was hailed as a masterpiece. She has since published six more novels, stories and screenplays. This is her first translation into English. Gopegui was born and lives in Madrid.

JENNIFER HABEL is the author of In the Little House, a chapbook that won the 2008 Copperdome Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Believer, Southeast Review, Gulf Coast, Water~Stone Review, Blackbird, and LIT. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL's poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming in Ecotone, Connotation Press, Connecticut Review, and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and her documentary work has been collected in Plundering Appalachia (Earth Wise) and This is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak (University Press of Kentucky). She holds an MFA from Drew University and teaches creative writing for Morehead State University. Currently, she is a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

COLETTE INEZ teaches in Columbia University's Undergraduate Writing Program. She has published over nine books of poetry and has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts two Pushcart Prizes, and many other awards. Her memoir, The Secret of M. Dulong, was released in 2008 by the University of Wisconsin Press.

KIMALISA KACZINSKI lives in Cheney, Washington. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eclipse, Floating Bridge Review, and Skidrow Penthouse.

ESON KIM earned her MFA degree from Emerson College, and her work has appeared in Flashquake, Lumina, and Inkwell. She received a 2009 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was named a finalist for the Arts and Letters Prize and the Glimmer Train Family Matters competition. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the David B. Saunders Award from Cream City Review.

ALAIN MABANCKOU was born in 1966 in Congo-Brazzaville. A professor of literature at UCLA, he is the author of many works, including a biography of James Baldwin, Lettre à Jimmy, as well as African Psycho (trans. Christine Schwartz Hartley), Broken Glass (trans. Helen Stevenson), Black Bazar, and Mémoires d'un porc-épic, which was awarded the Renaudot prize in 2006.

COLLIER NOGUES's first book, On the Other Side, Blue, will be published in Spring 2011 by Four Way Books. Poems of hers have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Jubilat, Barrow Street, Washington Square, and Third Coast, and she was the 2010 Fishtrap Writer-in-Residence in Wallowa County, Oregon. She lives in southern California, where she teaches at UC Irvine and Laguna College of Art and Design.

GRETCHEN PRIMACK's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Her chapbook The Slow Creaking of Planets came out in 2007. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she teaches and administrates with the Bard Prison Initiative.

HUSAM QAISI was born in Amman, Jordan, and moved to the United States in 2004. While in Jordan, Qaisi was a successful businessman and tradesman of electronics. He's sustained a love for poetry and literature since childhood.

FATIMA RASHID was born in Mecca and was raised in Long Island, NY. Some of her stories have found homes in publications such as Paterson Review, Southern Review, and Best New American Voices 2007. She is a doctoral candidate in Florida State University's Creative Writing program.

PHYLLIS RUDIN is the History Librarian at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

The poetry of IZET SARAJLIĆ has been translated into fifteen languages and taught to generations of schoolchildren in the former Yugoslavia. Born in 1930, he spent most of his life, including the siege, in Sarajevo. He died on the 2nd of May 2002, a day which, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is still May 1st—in other words, a worker's holiday. He had recently been made an honorary citizen of Salerno, Italy, and also received the Sixth of April prize, his country's major literary award.

MARK SCHAFER is a literary translator, teacher, and visual artist who lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Schafer's most recent work is the bilingual anthology of David Huertas poetry, Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). The Scale of Maps, his translation of Belén Gopegui's novel La escala de los mapas, will be published in January 2011 by City Lights.

CAROLYN SHREAD is Visiting Lecturer of French at Mount Holyoke College. She holds a master's degree in Translation Studies and a doctorate in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has translated both scholarly texts (Frederic Vandenberghe's Philosophical History of German Sociology; Catherine Malabou's Plastidty at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction and Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophy) and literary texts (Fatima Gallaire's House of Wives; Marie Vieux-Chauvet's The Raptors). She is currently working on a third Malabou translation: Ontologie de l'accident: Essai sur la plasticité destructrice.

ANNA SCHULEIT is a visual artist who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and whose early, large-scale installations revolved around sites of memory: Habeas Corpus (2000) at Northampton State Hospital, and Bloom (2003) at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. She has been a visiting artist at Smith College, MIT, Brown, Pratt, RISD, Bowdoin, BU, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. In 2006 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. A solo-show of her paintings and works on paper was on view at Coleman Burke Gallery in New York last Fall, and she recently completed a large painting commission for the University Gallery at UMass Amherst and a set-design for Ivy Baldwin Dance at the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York.

MICHAEL D. SNEDiKER is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press), and of a poetry chapbook, Nervous Pastoral (dove | tail press). His second poetry chapbook, Bourdon, is forthcoming from Jack Spicer's White Rabbit Press. His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Court Green, The Paris Review, and Pleiades. He teaches American Literature at Queen's University, Kingston Ontario. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he misses the Massachusetts Review crew ardently.

ABDOURAHMAN A. WABERI was born in 1965 in Djibouti. He is the author of several novels and short story collections. His In the United States of Africa (trans. David and Nicole Ball), Le Pays sans ombre, Cahier nomade, and Passage aux larmes have won numerous literary awards. He lives in Paris and the U.S., where he has taught literature at Wellesley and Claremont Colleges.

ERIC WEINSTEIN is the winner of the 2010 New Michigan Press/diagram chapbook contest for his collection Vivisection. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, and Third Coast. He is an MFA candidate at New York University.

A former Peace Corps Volunteer, DAVID YOST has published stories in more than twenty journals, including Witness, Pleiades, Asia Literary Review, and The Mid-American Review. He is currently at work on a novel about aid workers on the Thai-Burma border.

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