Editor’s Note
BY ABBIE KIEFER
POETRY READER
I don’t mean to brag, but in ninth grade I got quite a few As on the essays I wrote about the poems that our teacher photocopied, always off kilter, from an old Norton anthology. There was real pleasure in reading those poems. But I also remember my pleasure in thinking that I’d figured them out.
Long past my high school years, I still want to be that A student. I want to define with great specificity what a story or a sonnet is accomplishing and how I can learn from it as both a reader and a writer.
And there’s nothing wrong with that: the careful attention, the instinct to absorb. Lately, though, I’m trying to remind myself that I can let beautiful literature just be a vibe. Which isn’t to diminish a writer’s skill. There can be no vibe without craft, friends. But we can admire the result of that craft without also drafting a related thesis statement.
So if you want to look closely at the propulsive pacing of Ruth Awad’s “Take Me With You to the Mountains,” noting how the omission of punctuation rolls the reader into the speaker’s ache—do that. But if you want only to let that ache be your own for a bit, that’s also a fine choice. Do that instead.
If you want to read Hsien Min Toh’s two poems in this issue—”Single-seater airplane, going down” and “Out of the Sun”—and consider how they’re in conversation, what kind of arguments they’re building or refuting about our agency, our choices in how we spend our lives—yes, do that. They’re worthy of your consideration. But if you simply want to appreciate the crisp storytelling, want to linger for a bit with Cecil in the top turret or Cecil in his blindness—I think Cecil would welcome you.
Maybe “Avocado, Avocado” makes you pause over Danusha Laméris’s lush language. Maybe it makes you want to eat an avocado. Either way, the piece is doing its good work. You might read “Dear First Time Mother Having Your Baby Shower at the VFW” without once noting Kelly Dalke’s choices around voice because the narrator feels so present there couldn’t have been any choices to make—this is simply the way the narrator always had to sound. And when Todd Robinson writes, “Memory’s amber: Catholic church stoop—a hearse mouth full of flowers,” does he mean that memory is cloudy? That it’s preserved? I don’t know—but aren’t those lines gorgeous?
And there’s more where that came from. More gorgeousness, more questions. We’re so pleased to share Issue 48 with you and for you to experience it. Today, everyone gets an A for their effort, for their attention. In whatever form it takes.