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Poet Tom Sexton (photo by Kevin Harkins) Thanks to Michael Burwell of Alaska for sending us two recent commentaries on the late Tom Sexton and his final book of poems, “Dark Cloud in Isabel Pass” (Loom Press, 2025). Michael’s review-essay appears in “Cirque” literary magazine of Alaska and Nancy Lord’s…
Read More »Bottled Milk My family moved from a declining factory city to a rural town in 1956, from Lowell, where the ancestors had been since 1880, to nearby Dracut, Mass. The communities were established in 1826 and 1701, respectively. The English colonists had been in the area since the early 1650s.…
Read More »Pollard Memorial Library hosted the 4th annual Elinor Lipman Award for Writing on Oct. 30, 2025, announcing that UMass Lowell student Julia Magee won the award including a $1000 prize for a work of short fiction. From Westford, Mass., Julia is an English major at UML studying creative writing this…
Read More »Mars Mania in America Enjoyable throughout. Full of fun facts. A Lowell book you will go back to. Who knew the size of Mars Mania? “There’s always a Lowell connection” (Marie Sweeney quote). For the past two weeks I’ve been reading a new book by science writer David Baron called…
Read More »Pulled from an old notebook, here’s a “Time Tunnel” account of a random train ride from Lowell to Boston about 30 years ago. — PM Lowell Line (1994) A long train slides through the Thorndike Street station as I wait for the 9:07 a.m. run to Boston. Doing an errand…
Read More »With his book Estate Sale, Dan Murphy won the 2024 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry at the University of Utah Press. A writer with Lowell roots, he lives in the region with his family. Former US Poet Laureates Natasha Trethewey and Robert Pinsky call the book “a lovely…
Read More »This news release is reprinted from regalhousepublishing.com David Moloney I spent my twenties working in juvenile residential homes, mental hospitals, and a county jail. During that time, I wrote constantly—journals, stories, notes—keeping the muscles loose, even if the writing went nowhere. After my wife became pregnant, I left the jail…
Read More »“Overheard in the Orchard” by Linda Hoffman & Ellen Harasimowicz ISBN 978-0-9742474-0-3 [Copyright © 2025] Linda Hoffman is an artist, writer, and orchardist in Harvard, MA, and photographer Ellen Harasimowicz is a “visual storyteller” in the Boston area. Thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi writes, “Keep a green tree in your heart…
Read More »Mike McCormack, originally of Haverhill, Mass., is a long-time resident of Alaska where he became a close friend of poet Tom Sexton (1940-2025). Mike is a past contributor to this blog and to The Lowell Review. He wrote this introduction for Tom’s final book, Dark Cloud in Isabel Pass, published…
Read More »Long Purples by Paul Marion My wife Rosemary and I live in a townhouse condo atop a former ski slope in Amesbury, Mass., just uphill from the compact but busy downtown. Called Powow Hill for the original residents in this area, the 330-foot hill is crowned with a small public…
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