Poetry Editor’s Note

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.