Welcome back! I love celebrating the last year’s poets in August, and I love celebrating the new year’s poets in September. As someone who’s not always comfortable with beginnings and endings, I’m comforted by cycles like this. And I love the celebrations that come with cycles – celebrations of harvest in fall and fertility in spring; anniversaries and birthdays; holidays and festivals. I especially love more subtle celebrations of cycles: sitting in the dark watching a fire burn as wood turns to ash and smoke. Marveling over and then reburying the hibernating cicadas I accidentally exposed in the garden while I planted day lilies. These celebrations keep our memories alive while ushering us gently into a beginning, a new incarnation of our lives. We enter the future by building on the past. And from the look of things – the retrospective issue and our incoming submissions – it’s going to be a great year in the poetry column. We have incredible poetry for you this month. And we have a lot of it.Alvis Minor starts us off. Alvis’s work is subtle, beautiful, and chillingly powerful. I highly suggest reading it more than once – it gets even better every time you read it. Alvis’s word choice and imagery are brilliant. Music permeates the poems. And the tension in this work is sublime – sad but also full of beautiful possibility. Mr. Minor is a brilliant thinker, and his interview is rich and honest, as well as playful. You’ll see in the interview that Alvis and I are old friends. I’ve admired his work since I first read one of his poems in an undergrad workshop we were taking, and I could not be happier to be able to share his work with you.
Next, I’m happy to share with you the first contributor our new Associate Editor Julie Brooks Barbour has interviewed: the stunning work of Barbara Presnell! Both the interview and the poetry just about had me in tears. Of Ms Presnell’s work, Julie writes:
These poems consider the struggles we face not only outside the home but inside it. There are striking images in these poems, and Barbara Presnell’s narrative structure pulls them together into stories that we recognize and feel deeply as humans.
Associate Editor JP Reese shares two poets with us this month. Ms Reese writes of their work:
The title of Frank Reardon’s poem, “Sometimes it gets so bad that our failures are all we've got left to celebrate” pretty much sums up the generous insight the speaker gains in a kind of blue collar epiphany as he travels the Greyhound highways in search of freedom and a life he still thinks may be out there somewhere. The world-weary traveller discovers that wisdom can come from anywhere, even in Pittsburgh “at 2 a.m., / it was always / 2 a.m. in Pittsburgh” when an old, shit-smelling lady cadges a cigarette or two and offers the speaker a moment of beauty before the journey begins again and the bus rolls away toward the western night.
Fain Rutherford’s poem “Taurus at the Strait” takes risks in its use of iconic imagery. WCW’s wheelbarrow transforms itself into a metaphor for the ultimate end product of the journey most of us long to take—a journey that we imagine will land us in some perfect place. This is a poem about loss, about the move from innocence to experience, “…Each step / a slow call for the next. Each step / a pulse up the bone to the horns, / a bolt down to the earth’s core…”
Associate Editor Doug Van Gundy shares with us the work of poet Hedy Hebra this month. Mr. Van Gundy writes:
That these thought-provoking, idiosyncratic and deeply pleasing pieces from Hedy Habra are prose poems fits their purpose well, for while they are absolutely poems, Habra incorporates many not-poem elements in them to create a stronger alloy. By turns theatric, painterly, and cinematic, they read like folk tales filtered through Lake Michigan beach gravel.
Ed Higgins joins the column this month with two lovely poems. Higgins’ work, though acknowledging that life isn’t all cookies and milk, soothes me. I can sit and stare at beautiful nature for hours, and Higgins’ poetry feels like that. My tea’s often gone cold while I sit watching a lake or river. I love it when life feels like a slow breath, and that’s what Ed’s poems feel like to me.
Associate Editor Mia Avramut brings us the work of one poet this month. Mia writes:
Chris Siteman’s fascination with language, with languages, stands out, and captured my attention from the very first reading. I was drawn by the depth of the metaphors (both the discrete stone-metaphors, and the towering poem-metaphors) and by the play of light and shadows, violence and tenderness, anguish and reflection. These render the architecture of his poems a mysterious, multidimensional quality.
Emily Strauss provides us with the perfect final poem for this month: the beginning of another Connotation Press year. I love the cyclic nature of Ms Strauss’s poem and the number of cycles that get drawn into the overarching round of the poem. There is simplicity here, but also poignant imagery and beautiful connections. I wasn’t surprised to see that Ms Strauss was an English teacher because the voice in the poem is kind and understanding, but also precise and matter-of-fact when needed. This poem makes me think of my Mamaw on the farm, taking each year as it came, both as something built on years past and building years to come.
Welcome to a new CP year.