Mud Season Review
A Conversation with Featured Poet Tara Mesalik MacMahon by Malisa Garlieb, Mud Season Review Poetry Editor “This poem needed five years to find its enlightened middle.” Tara Mesalik MacMahon 1. Your poems in Mud Season Review flicker with memories of childhood, a brother, and parental relationships. What brought about the writing of these poems? What do you […]
Poetry Editor Malisa Garlieb interviews poet Romana Iorga. Read Iorga’s portfolio of poems here. “Nothing is quite as rewarding and revelatory as the moment when a line alights on the page as if out of thin air.” Romana Iorga The poem “Liminality” has arresting, dream-like images, such as the occult bookshop with doors “shaped like […]
Road Trip to Duke by Bill Glose Not once on the long trip down do we mention our motive, the manila-enveloped passenger in back, the magnetically-resonanced images and sheaf of medical assessments. We play games instead, racing through alphabets, cataloguing state slogans, slug-bugging a shoulder now and then. A Virginia sign proclaims This county invented […]
Editor’s Statement: Tyx deftly opens the poem in media res and builds a scene in few words. Not only do the details of the rain, plastic fork, and spicy eggplant snare the senses, the poem is filled with echoes of hard c throughout: car/congealed/cold curry/confluence/coconut. Ultimately, the brevity of language creates emotional expansion as we […]
“When I write of an organism, plant or animal, I want to be clear it’s not just set dressing for the poem.”
-Mary Beth Becker-Lauth
Poetry Editor Malisa Garlieb interviews featured poet Gwen Hart about personifying anxiety. “I value writing that takes anxiety seriously, but also lessens the stigma and helps people to find new ways to cope.” Your three poems in MSR explore and express anxiety, yet you unexpectedly flavor them with humor. Could you talk about what led […]
Editor’s Statement: Dugas leads us into a dreamscape where the world of plague and bad news is supplanted by color, art and café comforts. Yes, please! This poem is medicine for the isolated desperation settling in, and the declaration, “I want nothing but to finish loving you…get my reds all over you” had me rattling […]
Malisa Garlieb Interviews Issue #54 Poet Michelle Hulan. “While writing, I find I have to resist the urge for resolution, even sometimes preferring anti-resolution.” Michelle Hulan In “Sonnet for Fat Purple Figs” the speaker states, “I will consume enough versions of myself to fill a century.” I found that all three poems resist fixed identities […]
Ever wonder how journal editors make decisions about work to feature? The Take gives you a glimpse behind the scenes at Mud Season Review. Here, we feature one single poem or flash fiction piece that caught the attention of the editorial team, apart from the signature poetry portfolio or fiction piece in our bi-monthly issues. […]
Ever wonder how journal editors make decisions about work to feature? The Take gives you a glimpse behind the scenes at Mud Season Review. Here, we feature one single poem or flash fiction piece that caught the attention of the editorial team, apart from the signature poetry portfolio or fiction piece in our bi-monthly issues. […]
Ever wonder how journal editors make decisions about work to feature? The Take gives you a glimpse behind the scenes at Mud Season Review. Here, we feature one single poem or flash fiction piece that caught the attention of the editorial team, apart from the signature poetry portfolio or fiction piece in our bi-monthly issues. […]
Ever wonder how journal editors make decisions about work to feature? The Take gives you a glimpse behind the scenes at Mud Season Review. Here, we feature one single poem or flash fiction piece that caught the attention of the editorial team, apart from the signature poetry portfolio or fiction piece in our bi-monthly issues. […]
Poetry editor Malisa Garlieb interviews our featured poet Christine Butterworth-McDermott about her poems, exploring loss, transformation, and recovery.