Editor’s Note, June 2023

I’ve been out of school for twenty-two years and June is still the month of no more homework and no more rules for me, when the shorts come out and there’s more daylight than any other time of the year. It’s the beginning of the season of peonies and daydreaming, a month embodied as a poem: bright, elusive, dependable, emboldening, and curious all at the same time. There’s a reason Gwendolyn Brooks said, “We jazz June.”

At the same time, June (and the poetry in this issue) is finicky and in-between on its own terms. Technically the beginning of summer in Chicago, it’s still more like spring. Part Gemini season. Part Cancer season. Fully Pride month. It’s not the month when most humans are conceived (December is statistically), but the atmosphere feels like it should be. These days languish around us as everything is breaking open again.

It’s also the month when poets and poetry proliferate. There is no science or data here, just a feeling. June is the month of poets because so many of my favorites were born in June—Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Federico García Lorca, Nikki Giovanni, Frank O’Hara, W.B. Yeats, and Noah Eli Gordon, whose work appears posthumously in the magazine’s pages for the first time this month.

Though it doesn’t apply to every poem you are holding, the word sultry and its various synonyms come to mind when I’m thinking about the big cadences in this issue. Especially the folio spotlighting the poet Joyce Mansour, a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt. Mansour’s idiosyncratically surreal poems are provocative and mischievous in this new translation from the French by Emilie Moorhouse. They are, in the best way, the embodiment of the June jazz Ms. Brooks wrote about.