Save/for dreaming, writes Marcia Brown, we know how to shut things out, and that sentiment is echoed in the haunting final image of Iain Hailey Pollock’s poem, California Penal Code 484 & 488, of a bike with a new lock, with double loop of new chain.
When we speak about valuing diversity, here at Solstice, what we’re really talking about is staying open to as many voices and experiences as possible. It would not be easy imagining all/ these lives intersecting, writes D.G. Geis in his poem Counting Crows, and yet that seems to be the very purpose of our journal – to encourage such intersections.
Sometimes it comes from conversation between poems rooted in various places – we have poems, here, from Ashland, Kentucky to Memphis, Tennessee; Ukraine to the Great Rift Valley. And we have poems that explore the experience of being uprooted. We are the house and the tree,/ in somebody else’s story writes Ewa Chrusciel in her poem, Migrant’s Dream Under Water.
Sometimes the intersection is between content and form. Allison Rollins’ Elegy for a Broken Part might very well focus on brokenness, but its form offers us a sense of balance as her couplets repeat themselves in reverse order. Dorothy McKibben might be the gatekeeper in John Canaday’s powerful poem, but she speaks in terza rima – a form of intertwined rhymes.
And sometimes the crossroads involve the past and the present. In the translations by Sola Bjarnadóttir-O’Connell from the Icelandic, Gerður Kristný’s quiet but vivid imagery almost recall paintings in a museum and Ingunn Snaedal’s sometimes sparse words almost appear to be anchored in the modern world of tweets and text messages.
These intersecting poems in our Spring Issue encourage us to stay open, ask us to shift from feeling closed to feeling close, remind us that Silence speaks, as Lee Sharkey writes, where a tongue may not.
Ben Berman and Dzvinia Orlowsky
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.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six full-length poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones (2009) for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as the 2019 co-winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. In 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, (Lost Horse Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s National Translation Book Award in Poetry, and winner of the 2020-2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. Her and Ali’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2024 and her new poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall, 2024. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, founding director of Night Riffs: A Solstice Literary Magazine Reading and Music Series. and Poet-in-Residence at the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing.
