Editor’s Note, January/February 2024

The start of a new year is always a time of difficult reflection for me. Every January, in the thick of winter, my introspection is catalyzed by the litany of weeks when nights are appreciably longer than days. For those who trundle forward heart-first in the habit of poets, this particular new year feels even heavier than usual, full of a multiplicity of emotions: melancholy, anger, worry, and desire—for closeness, for wonder, for change.

Unsettled moments like these are when I turn to poetry. The kind of poems that allow me to blossom in my paradoxes and remaking the way “My Hair Burned Like Berenice,” the opening poem of this issue by Ruth Awad, does. Or the kind of ekphrastic poetry that uses visual art to try to codify loss and grief, as in Victoria Chang’s poem “Today.” These poems examine so many things related to but not only of the winter season: revelations that remind me spring will be here soon, but not too soon, and the hoarfrost will linger in the meantime. The work of these incomparable poets, in conversation with the many other exceptional and wide-ranging versifiers in this issue, help me to imagine a different present. After reading these poets, I am challenged and inspired to use the most daydreamy parts of myself to make it to spring. I’m challenged to be in the world as both metaphor and embodiment.

This inspiration is not just coming from the poems in this issue. Craig Morgan Teicher reflects on the ways that Terrance Hayes re-envisions his personal canon and, in doing so, nods to a necessarily modern kind of literary criticism that is part visual history, part memoir, and part lesson on poetic craft. At the same time, Robert Fernandez’s “Not Too Hard to Master” essay and writing prompt empower us to create poetry from whatever media and mediums inspire us. He charges us to make the art we couldn’t have imagined before this moment.

The beautiful celebrations and dissatisfactions of the poems, alongside Fernandez’s and Teicher’s essays, remind me that we need to write it weird, sing it in an imaginary key, headspin it in the opposite direction. Do whatever we must in order to enact the kind of art we want, whether the wind is whistling its tune or not, so that this year can be one of possibility instead of inevitability.