Introduction to Issue 87 [3Q2023] Poetry
First, please note that simultaneous submissions for poetry are no longer accepted since responses to poets with acceptances are completed before the end of the month after closure of the submission window. [Though I try to respond to poets without acceptances, it is safe to assume that if you haven’t heard from us before July 1 or January 1, your poems would’ve been released back into your custody and any inquiry shouldn’t be necessary.]
I thank those submitters who make my life easier in processing hundreds of submissions by following the guidelines [especially the part where it stresses that everything is to be in one Word document], sadly, there are too many who don’t; I have been very forgiving but this might have to change.
Now to the fun part! The work in this issue, as you will find, is delightful speculative poetry with literary quality and depth. Though I usually sequence the poems to conform to an arc of some kind, this time it’s mostly by reverse order received; however, they do form a natural progression of sorts. It opens and ends with father poems and alien invasions.
There’s a good mixture of science fiction (Huset’s and Siegal’s alien invasion poems just mentioned) and fantasy (St. Clair’s pied piper inspired poem and Silva’s prose poem), as well as a variety of others: reality horror (Kucera’s opening poem), eco-poetry (Backer’s poem on man-made noise pollution), science-like poetry flavored with love (Barbee’s lunar rainbow), imaginative poems (Southern’s junkyard exploration and Doreski’s play on light and shadow), and a storytelling poem (Machan’s work also features fantasy elements).
There are other resonances among the poems than already mentioned, like angelic vs. devilish harmonics.
Our poets usually come from allover the world but this time we just have a geographical distribution of the United States with half the poems from the New England states: North/Northeast (NH, RI, NY, PA), West/Midwest (AZ, IL), Southeast/Southwest (NC, TX).
Please enjoy their work:
Summer 1993 by John Kucera [Phoenix, AZ]
They Came in One Huge Wave by Zebulon Huset [Grand Prairie, TX]
Volume by Sara Backer [Hollis, NH]
Midnight Rainbow by Sam Barbee [Winston-Salem, NC]
The Man with the Stone Flute by Joshua St. Claire [New Freedom, PA]
Ash’s Lament by Laura G. Southern [Brooklyn, NY]
A Day of Definition by William Doreski [Peterborough, NH]
Soon the Moon Will Slip from Its Mooring,/Ride the River of Night Alone by Katharyn Howd Machan [Ithaca, NY]
The Singing Girl by Kim Salinas Silva [North Providence, RI]
Pop Forgot by Joshua Siegal [Skokie, IL]
John C Mannone
Senior Poetry Editor
