Michigan Quarterly Review :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

Michigan Quarterly Review

Publisher’s Description: Michigan Quarterly Review attempts to combine the best qualities of a literary journal with the intellectual rigor of an academic or scholarly journal. Investigative and speculative essays mingle with imaginative writing from the likes of Philip Levine, (the late) Arthur Miller, and Joyce Carol Oates—our contributing editors—and new writers whose reputations lie before them. Recent special issues include "China," "The Documentary Imagination," "Viet Nam: Beyond the Frame," and the "Secret Spaces of Childhood."

Writing from MQR is regularly reprinted in prize anthologies and textbooks. Recent topics include Orson Welles's correspondence on Macbeth and The Magnificent Ambersons, August Wilson, Holocaust poetry, Martin Luther King and "My Country Tis of Thee," cinephilia, 9/11, art vandalism, Samuel Beckett, dictionaries, good and bad medicine. We publish poetry and fiction that engage in such topics as well as the perennial subjects of self, family, sexuality. The editor insists on "answerable style"—that is, language that is equal in gravity, complexity, clarity, and wit to the subjects it explores.

Recent issues:

Fall 2011: Elizabeth Alexander on black experimental poetry, Marian Crotty on the borderline lover, Ilan Stavans on immigration and authenticity, Theodore Morrison on Jonathan Strong, Laurence Goldstein on Philip Levine. Fiction by Peter Ho Davies, Massa Makan Diabeté, Janis Hubschman, Peter Levine, Lia Silver, Jonathan Strong. Poetry by Randy Blasing, Todd Boss, Martha Collins, Patricia Hooper, Joe Wilkins.

The Great Lakes: Love Song and Lament—A special issue devoted to the Great Lakes (50.3, Summer 2011). Essays by Jerry Dennis, Anna Vodicka, Keith Taylor, John Knott, Alison Swan, Tiya Miles, Julia Gibson; Poetry by Albert Goldbarth, Margaret Noori, Holly Wren Spaulding, Ruth Joynton, M. Bartley Seigel, Terry Blackhawk, John Repp; Fiction by Steve Amick and Devin Murphy; Color portfolio: full-color photos of the Great Lakes basin selected from the exhibition "The Primacy of Water" curated by the River Gallery of Chelsea, Michigan.

The Spring 2011 issue features Joanna Brooks on the Mormon apocalypse, Amy Butcher on living with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, Bryon Edwards and Jeffrey Meyers on Paul and Jane Bowles, Roger Porter on the return of the exile, William Miller on losing it, Pearl Abraham on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Molly Patterson on culture, language, and belonging. Poetry by Thomas Lynch, Theodore Worozbyt, G. C. Waldrep, Janet Kauffman, and Georges Perros. Fiction by Kathy Flann and Karen Heuler.