The Missouri Review

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 In this Missouri Review podcast, we are pleased to present the wonderfully varied range of the second, third, and fourth runners-up from the Voice-Only poetry category of our 2007 Audio Competition. These are “The Golden Lesson” by Susan Somers-Willet, “Taking Tickets” by Eric Torgersen, and “Women in Strange Trousers” by Josh McDonald.
With “The Golden Lesson,” […]

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In this installment of The Missouri Review podcast, we feature the first place and first runner-up entries to the Voice-Only Literature (Poetry) category of our 2007 Audio Competition. Both of these awards go to poems by Todd Boss: “To Wind a Mechanical Toy” (1st place) and “Yellowrocket” (1st runner-up). Both poems are sonically resonant, without […]

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Somehow we’ve neglected to raise a fuss yet over the fact that Paul Guest, one of the poets appearing in our current issue, very recently won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, which currently comes with a sturdy cash prize of $50,000. Since 1985 it’s been awarded annually to ten emerging writers of promise, in […]

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On Tuesday, January 8, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen, one of our favorite local poets, as official poet laureate of Missouri.
Walter’s work has appeared in the pages of The Missouri Review no less than four times–in 1983, 1989, 1991 and 1997.

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A few weeks ago at the University of Missouri, I had the opportunity to go and listen to Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate. In fact, I got to see him speak twice: first at a question and answer session attended by a small group of writers in the Corner Playhouse, […]

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It’s something like a universal truth that in times of governmental repression and institutionalized violence poetry becomes an enemy of the state. Consider Anna Akhmatova’s situation in Stalinist Russia: after being identified as a “bourgeois element,” her poetry was banned from publication for fifteen years (1925-1940). Wole Soyinka, the great African poet and activist, was […]

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