Editor’s Note

When I was a kid, Christmas was my least favorite holiday. Despite all the good-will-toward-men caroling and yuletide trimmings, the commercials for Star Wars toys and shiny BMX bikes weren’t the titillating possibilities they were meant to be, but advertisements for what my family didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t have. It reminds me of the Notorious B.I.G.’s classic have-not lines from “Juicy”: “We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us/No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us.” There is no real joy in holiday capitalism, but in retrospect, the things we couldn't afford inspired us to create our own joyful rituals: PJs all day and Christmas movies on ABC, munching on homemade cinnamon bread until the delicious, messy loaf was gone.

Memories like these make holidays necessary for connecting and honoring our divergent histories and community traditions. Any annual celebration exists simultaneously across time: past memories, present experiences, and future opportunities are commemorated by anyone who participates. Every issue of the magazine tries to do this too, cataloging our various poetic and cultural moments in couplets and stanzas. This is especially true of the folio here, which honors the twentieth anniversary of Letras Latinas. Curated by poets Francisco Aragón and Laura Villareal, it is a compendium of some of the most vital Latinx poets working now, including Ada Limón, Carmen Giménez, and Rigoberto González. The creative and communal work catalyzed by founding director Aragón offers a template for how poets can hold their own histories, hold each other, and dream a different creative future together.

Holidays themselves, like the most inspiring poems, are situated in the most faithful parts of ourselves. We don’t always agree with the perspectives of our three-eggnogs-in half cousins or long-lost high school friends, but we rock with them at the holiday parties anyway because that’s what gatherings are for. At the end of every year, we’re all thinking of the future, one with the possibility of gentleness and abiding joy. Thanks to the poets here, like Elise Paschen, Megan Denton, and francine j. harris, among others, the celebration of living goes beyond our current demoralized moment, beyond consumerism’s year-end TV ads or corporate jingles. All the poets in this issue offer a similar kind of promise and faith, a bit of brightness and warmth when the days in Chicago are their shortest.