In our newest December issue, the speakers of various poems find themselves recalling the past, consciously or unconsciously. In “Tai Ma” by Angela Siew, the speaker calls upon their female lineage for access to the past and “the soil of our ancestral home, clatter / of green and white mahjong tiles.” In “The Way It Happened,” Connie Soper writes about the uniqueness of memory despite the facts about what has happened to a town “against a backdrop of bald hills, scarred by clear-cuts.” And in “Aftermath,” by David E. Poston, a poem in literature class jerks the speaker awake to an unforgettable memory, too harsh and methodical to be memorialized outside of Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”
Read Vol. 24, Issue 5 and consider whether “nostalgia leads only // to suffering,” as Tina Cane writes in “The Subject Line,” along with poems by Angela Siew, Robert Fanning, Pui Ying Wong, Ellery Beck, Connie Soper, Jeddie Sophronius, Cassie McDaniel, Ann E. Michael, John Miller, David E. Poston, Melissa Balut Fondakowski, Morgan Reed, Nick Conrad, Cammy Thomas, Sarah Carleton, Tim Suermondt, Emily Hockaday, Robin Turner, Mary Beth Hines. We also feature Susan Azar Porterfield’s review of This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A.E. Stallings, and John Bradley’s review of Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué.
