Dear Readers,
Welcome to our latest issue, where we take belonging and position to task. The voices in these poems, stories, and essays question what it means to long for place, and how to create it. What if the definitions of home, the locations of the past and ancestry, have been refuted, moved, lost? What succeeds them? Here are twenty-five writers who create huge new fields for expression of metaphysical inquiry with humor, delicacy, brutal understanding, and style.
A subversion of category defines much of the work found here. Truth and meaning, art and genre, are suspicious subjects; to deal with them, we turn to keen, curious writers. They question their subjects in turn with reverence and dismissal, until a corporeal understanding – one that defies description – quickly fills the spaces. A poem moves on the page in ways that escape explanation; a story walks its subject up an impossible stairway and returns with three more. And did I mention the fishing tales?
Christine Gosnay 