I’m always fascinated by the process of how an issue comes together – begins to find a shape and form of its own. What happens, say, when John Blair’s poem, What Happens to the Future, suddenly finds it way next to Dwayne Martine’s, Artifact. Or what it’s like to read Len Krisak’s piece about a scarecrow festival in St. Charles, Illinois, juxtaposed next to Hedy Habra’s poem about protests in Gezi Park. Or what it means to consider Jacob Strautmann’s The Land of the Dead is Open for Business beside Geraldine Zetzel’s Survivor. And it seems fitting as we approach the winter solstice that the issue begins with the line: So, I have lost you, in a poem called Autumn, by Tran Nhuong, translated by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Ba Chung and ends with this note from Geraldine Zetzel: Cold, let him not know/that I am to be your bride.
Ben Berman is the author of three books of poems and the collection of essays, Writing While Parenting, a 2023 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year. He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has been shortlisted twice for the Massachusetts Book Awards and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club and Somerville Arts Council. He’s been teaching for twenty-five years and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.
