Fall 2019, Volume 27

From the Poetry Editor

Fall 2019

All I’m ever looking for as a poetry editor and reader is to read something wonderful I wasn’t expecting. Now finishing its 13th year, Verdad, a magazine created and curated by editors as far-flung as New York, California, and Bahrain, continues to incorporate new, unexpected elements, most recently pursuing short films to add to our future biannual issues. It’s my great fortune to have found a piece of community here at Verdad in working with Bonnie, Rochelle, and Jack; in writing reviews, which inevitably means meeting terrific people putting books into the world; in gathering poems for each issue, which at times can actually lead to lasting writerly friendships; and in sending each issue into its readership, which often leads to fulfilling conversations. I’m happy to say that the poets in this issue have added to Verdad in engaging, insightful ways. So what wonders can you expect in the pages of the fall issue?

Deborah Allbritain gives us four post-love poems in a tragic voice landscaped with a “Blue eyeshadow sky” and a fairytale with a “Tired / Queen” who, upon seeing her ex with another, “Google[s] ways to starve.” There are “little barn windows twinkling this garage / door  [that] want to see your reflection, somewhat radiant, work gloved // and wielding the last of his everything across the floor.” In Kathleen Hellen’s ‘Jewels in the Net’ we see “failure / when it seems too familiar, shopping at the Dollar Store for / toothpaste.” And Ariel Machell offers readers “the night (…) bulging / with the unsaid said, both / of them settling between us,/ bruising their way into / the lamplight.” In ‘Some Angelology’ Bruce McRae re-envisions the celestial, giving us terrestrial “angels of indigestion and football (...) of stones dropped / in the ocean or flung at the sky.” Meanwhile, Cameron Morse reminds us that “there is no unnatural substance.” And there are reminders of sweetness in this issue’s poetry, too, as the woman in James Miller’s ‘Sugar’ says “sugar sugar, / at every stop.” And there’s fun in Robin Ray’s ‘Teenage Microbe’ who threatens the reader

      Mirrors sketch

      me visible. Rain clouds obey my thirst.
             Absolute anomaly to you. Oh, I’m the

      Vermeer snatched from the museum in
             Boston by a thief too bombed on Chenin
             blanc to care. Recognize me now?

Finally, we feature a poem from Robert Cording’s latest collection, Without My Asking, along with a review. I actually reviewed one of Cording’s earlier collections, Against Consolation, when I was an undergrad interning at the Cortland Review, and it was one of those wonderful unexpecteds to find that Cavankerry Press was releasing Cording’s new title this fall, and that I’d have the chance to see how he and I have grown since I first took sight of his work.

So enjoy, dear reader, these unexpected wonders, and find in these pages new additions to your own community.

 

                                                                                     — Bill Neumire