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Maria Luisa Arroyo’s “Unmasked”

Maria Luisa Arroyo’s “Unmasked”

Unmasked by Maria Luisa Arroyo for Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) | Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, 1993 LB squared, you flipped up my mask, askedme to write beyond my eyes, the Hagia Sophia, Agha-jan’s stern face, Mamani’s tear-soaked chador, their son, my husband...

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Annual Report 2019

 2019 ANNUAL REPORT Letter from our leadership Dear poets, friends, bibliophiles, partners & wordsmiths all, Joining Mass Poetry in 2018 as its executive director felt like a homecoming to me. I mean this in the deepest sense. Poetry, for many years, has given me...

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Getting To Know Allison Adair & Her New Book, The Clearing

Getting To Know Allison Adair & Her New Book, The Clearing

When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Poetry seemed a little exclusive to me when I was younger, a little chi-chi. But that was only because I wasn’t exposed to very much of it. In college I was interested in trying...

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Nathan Mcclain’s “Against Melancholy”

Nathan Mcclain’s “Against Melancholy”

Against Melancholy by Nathan McClain At first it is Beethoven’s Ninth I’m thinking of— not all of it—mostly the fourth movement, that rousing crescendo you might hear at the end of a movie where the protagonist has graduated or overcome some great hurdle, cello,...

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Getting To Know Steven Cramer & His New Book, Listen

Getting To Know Steven Cramer & His New Book, Listen

When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? There was no poetry in my parents’ house, and mostly genre prose. Ian Fleming, not Henry Fielding. From first to twelfth grade, I read what teachers assigned, too often less than...

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Danielle Legros Georges’ “Only”

Danielle Legros Georges’ “Only”

Only by Danielle Legros Georges Nature hides the most beautiful design: the norm, the anomaly, the rare, the rarest, which is to say, the only, and aren’t weeach, twins even, only? “Only” from The Dear Remote Neamess of You. Copyright 2016 by Danielle Legros Georges....

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Getting To Know Eman Hassan & Her New Book, Raghead

Getting To Know Eman Hassan & Her New Book, Raghead

When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? It was the summer I turned eleven. I discovered T.S. Eliot’s collected poems on my mother’s bookshelf, along with Emily Dickinson’s work. I was blown away by how you could use...

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Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Bad News, Again”

Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Bad News, Again”

Bad News, Again by Cameron Awkward-Rich after the June 2015 Charleston AME church shootingafter Mary Oliver There are so many reasons to stay inside, to lock the room around my heart. I don’t even like it. My heart. Bitter little fruit. Little lead stone, carnation...

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Steven Cramer’s “Rereading Tranströmer in a Pandemic”

Steven Cramer’s “Rereading Tranströmer in a Pandemic”

Rereading Tranströmer in a Pandemic by Steven Cramer I’ve seen next to no one.My street, which I’ve namedThe Busiest in the Known Cosmos,I could lay my body down on. Nobody’s sick, goes the newsfrom Antarctica, where snowpetrels, to repel predators, spewstomach oils...

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