What We’re Reading, from Associate Editor Mary Simmons
Whenever I need to reconnect with my personal sense of artistic inspiration, I revisit Anne Carson’s Short Talks (Brick Books Classics, 1992/2015). Short Talks was first introduced to me in a creative nonfiction course in undergrad, and later as a hybrid form in my senior seminar class. Over the years, I’ve approached this text in many different ways, and...
Why We Chose It: “Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn
“Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn will be featured in an upcoming issue of Mid-American Review. “Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn is an astounding metafictional work that shifts the authorial lens back onto the author (fictional, in this case). Though the story maps out the traits and behaviors...
Featured Writer: Sara Moore Wagner
Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has...
Interview Bites: James O’Bannon
James O’Bannon’s poems “Naming” and “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It” were published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI. In the spring of 2023, James agreed to answer a few questions by associate editor Christopher McCormick on his poetic work. . Your poem “Naming,” (after a poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen) which appeared in Volume XLI of Mid-American...
Book Review: Our Wives Under The Sea
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Flatiron Books, 2022. 240 pages. $16.73, paperback. Our Wives Under The Sea is the lesbian ocean horror book I didn’t know I needed. Julia Armfield’s brilliant debut novel centers around the relationship between Miri and her wife Leah, after Leah returns from a six month deep sea...
What We’re Reading: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
I’ve been revisiting Alexandra Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (HarperCollins, 2015). I find the novel fascinating in that it was written in a pre-Trump, pre-2020 America and yet it feels like the novel is, if anything, a postscript to the last few years. The novel deals with a woman, known only as “A,” dealing...
Featured Writer: Dustin Pearson
On Thursday, February 16th, Dustin Pearson will read his poetry as part of the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. The reading will take place at 7:30 at Prout Chapel at BGSU. Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millennial Roost, and A Family Is a...
Why We Chose It: “Daughter” by Dana Deihl
Daughter by Dana Deihl was selected for publication by Mid-American Review staff for Vol. XLI. Daughter is a piece of magical realist fiction that centers around the story of a mother who gives birth to a ghost baby. For reasons unknown, the baby daughter is translucent, floats above surfaces, and has cold breath. Separated from her husband...
Pets with MAR: Suki
Suki Simmons is an almost two-year-old brown tiger tabby who splits her time between Bowling Green and Cleveland, OH. She likes the color blue, tunnels, her mouse toy Horatio, looking out windows, and jump-scaring her human. She can often be found yelling for food. (Photo courtesy of Mary Simmons, MAR)
What We’re Reading: by associate editor Tyler Michael Jacobs
I’m currently sitting with Kwame Dawes’ collection Nebraska (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). I just love Dawes’ poem “Chadron” from this collection and looking at the poem as an interrogation of the myth of the frontier and the speaker’s place as “a strange statue in the wind” (25) of Chadron, NE. I find this collection to be a search of...
Featured Writer: Laura Walter
Laura Maylene Walter will read her work as part of the Prout Reading Series hosted by Bowling Green State University in Prout Chapel, January 26th, at 7:30pm. Laura Maylene Walter is an author, editor, and BGSU alum currently based in Cleveland Ohio. She has been published in Poets & Writers, The Sun, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Slate, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, and many more...
Review: Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama
Poetry Unbound: 50 Poem to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama. W.W. Norton & Company. 384 pages. $22.99, hardcover. On Being Studio’s podcast Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pádraig Ó’Tuama and first broadcast early in 2020, sets a high bar for all poetry media. It is gently-voiced, ceaselessly generous in its readings, and effortlessly vulnerable. Ó’Tuama’s...