Fall 2014, Volume 17

From the Guest Editor

Welcome to the fall issue of Verdad!  One of the most frustrating things about being a writer is, as imaginative as I can be, I’m stuck with only my head, my voice. That’s one of the most exciting elements in selecting work for Verdad: I can make the magazine’s voice contain multitudes, and this issue is a great example of that, with everything from erasure poetry by Patrick Williams that asks, How Do We Perceive Anything? to Sarah C. Harwell’s “Threesome” that confronts the reader with the horrors of the mourning doves [who] chose to eat their fellow bird / having no feeling for the chicken. Ann Lederer introduces us to frost-maddened bumblebees, and Jordan Hart’s poem forms a tornado with its words and typography that mimics the tornado of its content.

Of course, the idea in gathering a cross-section of great and greatly diverse poetry is to achieve what Howie Good says in “Utopia or Bust:” if it works, the words fly up into the air and bear toward you with that sort of radiant radioactive look and grab you like barbed wire by the hand. Well, Sean Conrey’s poems achieve that effect through pure rhythm and incantatory quality: Then seven girls on seven playgrounds wept on slides, yet Richard Garcia’s work achieves it through his surreal imagination, which offers us prose poems that thrive on repetition. In yet another alcove, Christopher Buckley’s narrative and timely poem claims, it has to be at least 60 years since / anyone was brave or blameless enough / to ask such a pure and reasonable question.

Oh, and did I mention new and fantastic art and fiction? I’ll leave words on those pieces to our master of the eye, Jack Miller, and our grand, angelic Editor Bonnie Bolling. Please know, curious reader, that this issue, as all of our issues, exists because of the grand and limitless scope of the writers and artists who submit their work, because what is in your mind makes my mind, and the minds of our readers tingle. Verdad also exists because of great people like Editor Bonnie Bolling, Editor-at-Large Frank Gaspar, Art Editor Jack Miller, and web guru Rochelle Cocco, who keep this thing moving and whirring while I do the fun stuff these days. As always, I am grateful.

 

                                                                                     — Bill Neumire