“Do I really know what I think I know?” asks Heather Kirn Lanier in her essay “An Ounce of Light.” “Do I see what’s truly there?” Beset by a mysterious itching that defies diagnosis, Lanier questions the medical community, and herself, as she searches for relief. There are many kinds of knowing and unknowing in this issue’s essays and stories, people reaching for what evades them—sometimes glimpsing it, sometimes grasping it, sometimes missing it altogether. In Mariah Rigg’s “The Impossible Real,” a woman looks back on the intensity of an adolescent friendship fraught with danger and betrayal as they explore the terrain of their emerging sexuality. During a residency on a strange, remote farm, a grieving artist forms a tentative connection with the enigmatic caretaker in Daniel Kuo’s “Empty Spaces.” A young woman, in Thea Chacamaty’s “Death of Marat,” takes a position as a personal assistant to an aging rock star she thinks might be her biological father. In Amanda DeMatto’s “The Little Spragger,” a grandfather with undiagnosed dementia grapples with the mystifying loss of his beloved grandson. Marney Rathbun meditates on the ways in which we come to know one another, and ourselves, through the pleasures of food in “On Feasting.” Finally, in “Lariat,” Dana Cann reflects on his father’s long-buried childhood trauma and its impact on their relationship. In each of these pieces, what is imagined, desired, feared, forgotten, or remembered can both tease and torment. But sometimes the remedy is trusting intuition, even in the darkness. “An ounce of light would be everything,” Lanier tells us. And yet, “I realized: I had known before I knew.”
As we move closer to the darkest days of the year, we hope you’ll join us here, in these pages, and find a bit of light. Welcome to the fall/winter issue.
—Stephanie G’Schwind, Editor-in-Chief
Candor is the morning star of Truth, its brightest messenger. And in a time of advancing and, perhaps, given this strange autumn, insuperable darkness, let me draw your attention to the candid lights shone by poets assembled here. Take note of Andrew Maxwell’s “unending” and “innermost” lights. Take note of Shira Dentz’s “concentric/ of communal sunlight.” Take note of Craig Morgan Teicher’s companionable light in its sure ascent. You might begin to think that all real poetry is simply the unguarded candor of lights. And you’d be right.
—Donald Revell, Poetry Editor
Featured in this issue:
Dana Cann, Thea Chacamaty, Amanda DeMatto, Shira Dentz, Allison Hutchcraft, Katherine Irajpanah, Mark Irwin, Jenna Johnson, Robert Krut, Daniel Kuo, Heather Kirn Lanier, Christine Larusso, Ezra Garey Levine, Andrew Maxwell, Jenny Molberg, Nathaniel Perry, Jacques J. Rancourt, Marney Rathbun, Mariah Rigg, Madeleine Scott, Craig Morgan Teicher, and G.C. Waldrep
