Michigan Quarterly Review – Winter 2004

Michigan Quarterly Review always features interesting essays, and this issue is no exception; my favorite was George Watson’s essay, “The Cosmic Comic,” on the life and writing motivations of Douglas Adams. Two new poems by Adrienne Rich appear here as well, and the rest of the (sadly, very few) poems are excellent, including Donovan Hohn’s “Ars Poetica” and Charles Harper Webb’s “My Wife Insists That, On Our First Date, I Told Her I Had Seven Kinds of Hair.” A few lines from that poem:

Michigan Quarterly Review always features interesting essays, and this issue is no exception; my favorite was George Watson’s essay, “The Cosmic Comic,” on the life and writing motivations of Douglas Adams. Two new poems by Adrienne Rich appear here as well, and the rest of the (sadly, very few) poems are excellent, including Donovan Hohn’s “Ars Poetica” and Charles Harper Webb’s “My Wife Insists That, On Our First Date, I Told Her I Had Seven Kinds of Hair.” A few lines from that poem:

…I’ll bet I groped
in my suddenly dim brain, and spilled whatever
I found into our talk, I was so eager to keep it sizzling,

so hungry to seem a man whose invention never failed,
well-endowed with all good things, including hair,
“At least one kind,” I must have meant, “is right for you.”

Michigan Quarterly Review is that rare find – a down-to-earth and accessible academic journal.