Editor’s Note

I am writing this in November, but my thoughts are on New Year’s Eve traditions. Growing up, the only holiday my family celebrated was New Year’s Eve, we didn’t even celebrate birthdays. On New Year’s Eve, we’d stay up late to watch the ball drop, then wake to small gifts under our pillows in the new year. For some reason, I always interpreted New Year’s Eve as a sigh of relief. The year was over. Time to start again, better and new.

But the January issue reminds me that we can move forward without losing the past. A new year can be about building, about deciding to collaborate, about doing better. In her essay “Crip Ecologies: Changing Orientation,” Petra Kuppers asks, “What are your care webs, your creative and nourishing communities?” Having spent my life in Arkansas, when I first moved to the Midwest, almost exactly a decade ago now, this was a loss I felt deeply. Where was my community? In many ways, it threw me into conversations about which community was mine to begin with, and from these difficult conversations, I finally found homes and care in poetry. But I was also angry. I didn’t see my community reflected in the books I was given, in my education, or in poetry at large. Being a marginalized person looking for community often means not just seeking community, but building it ourselves. This can be not only a harrowing experience, but an overwhelming one.

When we are called to create our own community, I think of what Kay Ulanday Barrett says: “People like me are called to reimagine and improvise in a climate that deploys violence against us and our ability to write anything down. What is more poetic than that? The ultimate free verse poem.”

There’s excitement about the possibilities of building your own community, but there is also anger. There is loneliness. I think we see so many of these complex, layered emotions in this issue.

These emotions are present when David A. Reyes asks, “But how do we continue to survive?” I want to write something uplifting here. I want to say anything is possible. But I can’t say that.

Still, in this issue, I am overwhelmed with hope. In the Flyover Country folio, we also see cultures and people coming together. Sometimes this is due to forces outside their control, or sometimes it is due to their own choices. Either way, these poets are creating something new. They are building and reshaping what community means.

If we can learn one thing from these poets, I hope it’s that we don’t leave the past behind us and that we don’t let our surroundings decide who we are. Instead we can bring along our histories in order to shape a new world. As we enter 2022, let’s not say goodbye to 2021. We take the lessons we’ve learned, the growth we’ve gained. We honor our pain and our losses. We build our own futures.