I’m writing this note on board a transatlantic flight, hurtling through the night over a crawling ocean, winging my way toward a city I haven’t visited in forty years. I’m unsure of what will be familiar upon arrival, and what will be new and disorienting. I’m also writing less than two weeks before a tumultuous national election, as we stumble toward an outcome I can’t foresee in this liminal moment, only knowing that our landscape will be fundamentally changed by the time you read these words. To read a compelling poem is a lot like this moment, soaring on a lyric arc toward some point beyond your known horizon, fueled by the poet’s deft maneuvering of language and image, circling in to land into a space that might be joyous or terrifying or unexpectedly familiar. Poetry is such a vivid form of literary travel, and the poems in this issue are remarkable transports, fanning out to carry us across tension and uncertainty to new sublime destinations. In Tim Mayo’s “A Different Color of Sun” the poet begins a long haul of recovery from a traumatic brain injury to assess his state of function in mind and body. Tjizembua Tjikuzu navigates that complex space between Black joy and the historical trauma of the Middle Passage in “Oumou Sangaré’s Laughter.” Marjorie Maddox’s “Is” takes us on a sinuous meditation of the nature of rivers and their journey from source to sea. All of these poems launch us on diverse and dazzling trajectories, and my hope is that you will find yourself arriving at the destination that is the challenge, or the comfort, or the enlightenment that you need in this swirling current moment. Buckle up.
–Robbie Gamble
Robbie Gamble’s essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Pangyrus, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree and Tahoma Literary Review. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. He worked many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and now divides his time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
