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...
An Interview with Jeff Fearnside
Jeff Fearnside, author of Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and, most recently, Ships in the Desert, is a writer of fabulous range and grace. After his poem “What We Call Home” was featured in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, Jeff agreed to speak to a...
Poetry Review: The Pact by Jennifer Militello
The Pact by Jennifer Militello. North Adams, Massachusetts: Tupelo Press, 021. 80 pages. $19.95, print. The Pact by Jennifer Militello is a fantastic collection of poems tackling provocative themes: complex relationships, places of vulnerability, love, and danger. The cliché of never judging a book by its cover does not apply here—a Venus flytrap on a black backdrop furthers this essence of hunger or longing in this collection but...
Poetry Review: Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko
Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko. Flowstone Press. 2021. 33 Pages. Paperback. Chopping Wood in the Moonlight is Ken Letko’s tribute to nature and simple living. In these tightly crafted poems, the author utilizes his years of traveling and collected wisdom to celebrate a life lived authentically. In the title poem, Letko invokes the ancient Chinese...
Poetry Review: The Track the Whales Make by Marjorie Saiser
The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected Poems by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print. The Track the Whales Make begins with a section of new work and then features poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, starting with the most recent and then moving backwards in time. Like Saiser’s poems themselves, the book’s construction creates a sense of what is fleeting. As the...
Poetry Review: Unholy Heart by Grace Bauer
Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer. The Backwaters Press: An Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. 2021. 169 pages. $19.95. Paperback. New and selected poetry collections can sometimes be cumbersome when approaching any poet to experience their work. I always find that’s because we must figure out where to begin. With Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer, it’s...
Fiction Review: Hoaxes and Other Stories
Hoaxes and Other Stories by Brian Dinuzzo. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 161 pages. $17.95, paperback. Right away, this book pulled me in. The titular Hoax, the leading story of the collection by Dinuzzo, is about a budding actor who keeps dying, found the victim of a number of terrible accidents, though each one reported...
Featured Writers: Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia
Distinguished alumni Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia will read their poetry as features of Bowling Green State University’s Winter Wheat Festival of 2022 from November 10th– 12th. Remi Recchia Remi Recchia writes with an unflinchingly graceful and poignant voice that resounds in every line of his poetry. Poems like, “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living...