Issue XXXIV December 2022
edited by Lois P. Jones
Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collections are Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017). Her tenth collection, instead, it is dark, will be out from Red Hen Press in 2023. Her third book-length translation (with Sylvain Gallais) is Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). Hogue’s Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions 2022). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2013). She lives in Tucson.
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The blue tilt of/
earth has entered us, altering/ each burnt-out season. ~Joanna Klink There’s a seismic vein in Klink’s words that carries something beyond loss – like an ore of remembrance to ensure not only the continuance of our beloveds but our bifurcated existence without them. Whether through illness, death, divorce, violence, our lives shift tectonically and they do not shift back. Are our eyes now permanently opened to suffering? These recent years seem to move beyond virus to a cumulative anguish – our history, our wars and guns, the damage we’ve wrought to person and to place. The poems in this issue heighten our awareness beyond pain and our need to fracture, bringing together voices that shift and deepen our understanding of this blue tilting earth. True poetry is panoptic. It sees the past, present and possible futures we may know. It asks that we continue to witness beauty. To know the shadow of anything/is the thing trying/to manifest another self. (Saddiq Dzukogi). That the ruins of the dance are the dance. (Joseph Fasano) and how the lip has a sing to it, a whisper/of wine or alabaster far from the grave. (Jennifer Militello). That we might sleep the sleep of the apples, and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away… (Federico García Lorca). Lois P. Jones Editor, Issue XXXIV, December 2022 |
