Editor’s Note

Because I make a living by teaching, I see September—not January—as the start of a new year. It’s a time of pause, reflection, and refinement. I hate the loss of heat here in the Midwest, but I love the sense of possibility that the new year confers, even as autumn marks the culmination of so much growth, the movement through harvest into conservation and rest. The world begins its slow turn toward sleep, and I roll up my sleeves and get to work, summer not exactly behind me, but nearly out of view.

With that spirit, I offer you these poems and translations by an exciting array of makers. Here, we have poems that mark endings as beginnings and beginnings as endings, whose speakers pursue new ways forward relationally and new ways to live. We have poems of memory and postmemory; of love and relationships, the vulnerability that their flourishing requires and the assumptions that chip away at their foundations. We have poems that meditate on the language we use to locate one another, and ourselves; on the meaning we make of our lives, and the meaning our lives make of us.

Our issue closes with “My Name Back to Me,” a special folio of work by the legendary poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, who passed away in 2018. The work has been excerpted from Sing a Black Girl’s Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange, alongside an introduction by editor Imani Perry. The volume will be out later this month from Legacy Lit, and it is our honor and privilege to offer some of Shange’s work to you.

If you, like me, find yourself looking behind and ahead during these final weeks of summer, I hope these poems will help carry you into the next season, closing doors within, and opening others.