“Everything I didn’t tell her felt like something I needed in order to construct a place I could live all by myself, high off the ground,” the narrator of Becky Hagenston’s “Voluntary” recalls of a visit to a hospitalized high school friend many years earlier. Grasping at a sense of control amid her friend’s eating disorder, struggles at school, and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, she would eventually find that retreat—and, ultimately, its isolation. We’re all, perhaps, looking for a bit of control—and refuge—these days, as evidenced in this issue’s other stories and essays. In Rebecca Turkewitz’s darkly atmospheric “The Mill Girls,” a young woman yearns to break free from the social norms and expectations of mid-nineteenth-century Maine. An executive sous chef attempts to turn the tables on the culture of sexual harassment in Ji Hyun Joo’s “Chef Clem,” asking at one point: “Who did this body that I was inhabiting truly belong to? Who was calling all the shots?” A young boy in Leanne Ma’s “The Killer Slope” feels powerless as he contends with school bullies, bickering and demanding parents, and anguish at having witnessed a horrific traffic accident, but finds an unexpected haven in his stern teacher. In “Vectors,” Jamie Cattanach explores her fear of flying, the legacy of her father’s anxiety—his “frantic clamor to . . . control the situation.” In “Hills, Birds, Bones,” Calla Jacobson tenderly recounts dealing with her aging mother’s gradual loss of autonomy, then grief in the face of her mother’s unexpected death, and the solace she finds in the natural world. Sarah Carvill considers, in “Extant,” degrees of extinction and the human interventions to mitigate species loss. “I am trying to believe in the life of the world to come,” she writes, but concedes that when overwhelmed, she seeks refuge in memories of a place she loved, “a valley somewhere in the West.”
Control may be an illusion, but we can always find ways—even small ones—to help, protect, and heal. And when “the world is too much with us,” we can also retreat for a bit, construct a place for sanctuary, whatever that may look like for each of us: real, imagined, or remembered. May the work in this issue offer you a bit of respite.
—Stephanie G’Schwind, Editor-in-Chief
In these darkest hours of mid-winter, past the holidays—and, yes, the election—while people across America contend with the either the biggest winter storm in a decade or the costliest firestorm in US history, and war continues to rage around the world, and the planet heats up, may you pause and count the art of your blessings. The fingers on your hand. The smell of your child’s hair. Sunlight through winter trees. Art: to show us truth and beauty, yes, but to show us how to practice it, day after day.
In this issue of Colorado Review, we see the durational character of experience in a dizzying array of serial poems. No fewer than six poets (and a case could be made for more) employ serial forms to mark the daily forms of experience. From Susan M. Schultz’s interrogative “I and Eucalyptus” poems to Tor Strand’s inhibitory “Eden” series, to the searing portraits of trauma in John Allen Taylor’s poems, what happens stays happening. And there’s more—Maxine Chernoff’s “Diary” series reminds us war is always near, a simultaneity in the I and Thou of poetry: “Maybe tonight when you light your lamp, you are dead already but unaware of your passing.” And it’s there in Amit Majmudar’s “Kabul”: “You. Not you. You. You three. Dad, over there. / The airstrip shimmers. Concrete mirage. / A family rides the landing gear / Into the fuselage.”
That dialogic awareness of privilege and precarity is worth noting as the art of sustained attention in family, love, work, place, weather, etc. Sarah Kathryn Moore gets us going with the moody “Degrees of Gray in West Seattle,” a surprising homage to Richard Hugo. And Miriam Akervall ends the issue in the placeless heartland: “Now we belong / to oscillations in wheat anywhere. / Where a field dips steeply toward its edges / Where a field sits up and yawns from the earth.” Art can, if not save us, offer a vision of clarity about what world we live in, or the world we would like to create: “as if life were lived intact . . . and didn’t know / it was not finished / as if the continuing . . . of not being finished / were what life was leading toward” (Edwin Torres). May you hold to that vision in the coming months, may you hold to the keen edge of this issue of Colorado Review.
—Matthew Cooperman, Poetry Editor
Featured in this issue:
Miriam Akervall, Jonathan Aprea, Kristin George Bagdanov, Sarah Carvill, Jamie Cattanach, Brittany Cavallaro, Maxine Chernoff, Becky Hagenston, Calla Jacobson, Ji Hyun Joo, Mackenzie Kozak, Leanne Ma, Amit Majmudar, Sarah Kathryn Moore, Triin Paja, Eric Pankey, Xiaoqiu Qiu, Ira Sadoff, Susan M. Schultz, Tor Strand, John Allen Taylor, Edwin Torres, Rebecca Turkewitz, Adam Ray Wagner
