Spring 2022, Volume 32

From the Poetry Editor

Welcome to the Spring 2022 issue of Verdad!

Borrowing from the language of Carol Alexander’s ‘Single Mother’ poem in this issue’s pages, I would like to welcome you to late spring 2022, an issue full of the “architectural details” of a “ceaseless curiosity,” an attention to magical detail conveyed in Ion Corcos’s eyeing of the “crookedness of water after rain.” The poems that ricochet off each other here brim with the eager feeling that we are on the cusp of summer, of freedom. Joe Benevento reawakens Gerard Manley Hopkins’ springy sprung rhythms with a fan-fiction persona poem, ‘After Margaret Did Not Believe How Soon Forsythias Turn Green,’ where, felicitously, he sees that “May kneels towards / summer’s passion.” And Nicelle Davis delivers a series of verdantly teeming prose poems based on Ronald Koertge’s Plant Questions; provocative and poetic, these pieces ask, “How many things are never seen because of photography?”. Davis proffers assertions and questions tied directly to the nature of being a poet: “Is History a teacher or a politician? This question makes me wish I wasn’t a poet.” It’s a voice that is intrigued by “how much of the self can be sold” as she strikes clever cultural notes offset by affecting declarations like “Nothing that is kept can love its keeper.” Meanwhile, Katerina Canyon, in her poem ‘Staring Across the Atlantic,’ echoes this sentiment of the kept as she recounts a history of slavery and painful integration in the process of becoming “‘America, not American,” but also a history of song as her speaker sings, “We learned to read the stars through knot holes, / And to sing songs in tune with the waves. / That ’s when we became American.”

On another note, Doug Anderson returns with five poems that speak of aging and regret with hard lines like “I know nothing of love after all these years” and “Who’d have thought impermanence / could last so long,” even as his speaker in ‘My Heart’ Googles to find that “‘The heart's electrical field is 60 times / greater in amplitude than / the electrical activity generated by the brain,’” which intimates a recommendation on how to write, but also on how to read and how to live: heart first. It’s a method, as these poems make clear, that is not without risk of regret. Additionally, John Loughlin contributes his poem ‘Midnight Bus,’ a spectral account of a search party that ends “Asking when she’ll come home.” Ghostly, too, in its estranged freedom, David O’Connell’s ‘Watching My Wife Parasail’ describes a speaker watching his wife floating over the earth as the speaker realizes “this too / is something I want, and that I want so much already.” In this issue, I also offer a review of Camille Guthrie’s newest poetry collection, Diamonds. It’s a book that has garnered massive attention, deservedly so (I like to think that I was one of the first to recognize how brilliant it was even if this review is coming out late to the party). It’s a funny and crushing collection that articulates a sudden loneliness and still lets us know that this labor of art, as much as it is play, is how we survive the overwhelming cloud of living:

The sea level rises idealism falls

And ruthless ideologies abound

Put your head down

We have serious work to do


So, though Anna Weber’s ‘When the Snow Came’ tells us how “Summer / felt suddenly very far away,” I hope you enjoy the serious work of the words in this issue–the work that embodies Davis’s “curse of the poet [which] is knowing there are no such things as synonyms”--and that the invincible summer comes to your aid soon.

                                                                —Bill Neumire