Editor’s Note

After announcing my guest editorship in January, I immediately balked at the charge I had given myself. I stood by every word—the fact of our interconnectedness, the focus on inclusion and access as editorial (and existential) values—but now faced the daunting task of actually demonstrating those values in this, my first issue: a 96-page opportunity to capture, from literally thousands of submissions, some essential human quality I wanted to believe was present—had to be present—inside any poem. What did I get myself into?

As I read the abundance of enlivening and difficult work that waited for me in the submission queue, I was amazed to see that the ideas of interconnectedness that I had espoused—that we are beholden to one another and to those yet to come—and attending notions of influence, in its various forms, were present inside the poems themselves. What I had imagined as a conceptual frame, a lens through which to consider the work that came to the magazine, began slowly to assert itself thematically.

In this issue, I have endeavored to include a range of voices, aesthetics, geographies, languages, identities, and subjects. We have poems from first-time contributors and long-time ones; folks with one book and folks with a dozen; and poems from six different countries, in as many languages. The unifying thread—at times subtle, at times demonstrative—is how we shape one another, for better or for worse; how we induce change and growth in those around us, intergenerationally or laterally; and how this influence shapes, or even dictates, the ways in which we live our lives.

In these poems, we see meditations on the climate crisis and on living within capitalism; the difficult reality of violence begetting violence; literary mentorship opening new pathways, challenges, and concerns; poems of peace, of pain, of joy, of selfless wonder, of humor, in inherited and experimental forms, free verse and metrics—and an essay on the impact that living between cultures can have on one’s aesthetic orientations, as writer and reader, and the myriad ways in which we “translate.”

The issue closes with “Déjà Vu: A Folio on Assotto Saint,” whose Sacred Spells: Collected Works will be released this summer by Nightboat Books. Saint was a crucial figure—alongside Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs—in the development of a new poetics by Black gay men in the US who were surviving the pandemics of AIDS and white supremacy in the eighties. With an introduction by Pamela Sneed and a statement by Saint himself about why he wrote, the folio testifies to both the pain Saint’s community navigated and the love that buoyed and gave their lives meaning. It is an honor to spotlight his work for you.

I hope the poems in this issue will challenge and inspire, agitate and console, and even, in some small way, change you. Thank you for reading and for your community in this art we share.