Fall Updates

It is somehow November, and my tenure as guest editor comes to a close. Just last week, I drove to my first in-person reading, and I wasn’t looking forward to the long drive. After months and months of staying in my comfortable radius, a long drive felt impossible until my ears started popping as I drove up a winding hill to a burst of mountains, birch trees in their fiery dress. The world opened itself wide and welcomed me in.

I want to take this space to highlight some of the work in the September, October, and November issues of Poetry, directing your attention, as a piece of writing does, to look there, there, and there, and perhaps you’ll find something else, too.

The November issue features Collaborative Works, and every single piece of work grapples with language and what it means to work together to create art. The online issue also houses a space for each collaboration to elaborate on what it was like writing together, and I do hope you dive in.

Here you can find Nilufar Karimi and Eliseo Ortiz’s “Abecedarian after border speeches” where you can find and download a font “based on 40 barriers initiated or substantially fortified between 2000 and 2020,” poems by Kim Seong Eun and Cindy Juyoung Ok which show the power of exchange between mother and daughter despite language barriers, and a series of visual poems titled “Would That” by the collective She Who Has No Master(s).  

Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing. Most importantly, thank you for being here with poetry and inside a fleeting moment of intimacy we will one day strive to remember.

I want to close with two questions that were in my mind during these last few months. I hope you find some answers in these pieces, just as I have.

Who are we to each other?

Saddiq Dzukogi, “Ring”
Fritz Ward, “Love Letter from Inside Fatherhood”
Christell Victoria Roach, “Kings of the Court”
RK Fauth, “Queer Appalachia”
Jinhao Xie, “moonlight”

Where do we come from?

Yasmine Ameli, “Bedtime Story [5]”
Stevie Edwards, “Parthenogenesis”
L.A. Johnson, “If Your Hands Are Full of Fire”
Anni Liu, “Jiāngsū, Early Summer”
Mai Der Vang, “I Understand This Light to Be My Home”