Dear Reader,

To be perfectly honest, this year’s National Poetry Month seemed a little bland.  Seriously—what ever happened to the radically verbose, booze-filled basement readings of yesteryear?  There are some still out there—those pen-driven, early-to-rise verse lovers who would rather drown in a pool of metaphysical ink than miss an opportunity to mouth off a stanza or two—and as such, we’ve decided to dedicate an issue just to them.  And so here it is: our very first poetry issue. 

Suffice to say, this quarter’s issue was not your average put-together.  It took hours of sifting—and hula hooping—in order to find the best, and believe us when we say we’re pleased with the outcome: five pages of original, weapons-grade poetry. 

So why all the poetry?  Poetry is unique: never has a form accomplished so much in so few words.  Take this quarter’s issue as an example: In Noah Siela’s poem “The Higgs Boson,” the isolated lives of two step-brothers are measured side-by-side; in “Instead of Praying,” Sarah Jane Miller muses beyond the symbolic depths of a father-daughter relationship.  Further, we are once again proud to present poet Zachary Crabtree, whose surgical attention to detail and rhythmic flow continues to amaze us.  Last but not least, we welcome Lucia VanDyke, whose short-on-words strategy manages to capture tension at its unbreakable peak in the poem “Nervous Women.”

Though we have no new fiction to offer this quarter (alas, the prose turnout could have been better), we are glad to present a sparkling-new array of art submissions.  Thus, we are thrilled to introduce this quarter’s cover artist, David Hollenbach, whose hybrid style captures emotion in its most scrapbook form.  Last, we’d like to give a shout-out to photographer Benjamin Hoke, whose exploration across Baltimore’s urban and natural landscapes attempts to uncover what is undetectable in ordinary photography.

Springtime is here.  What better way to shoulder-off the ice than to dive into some good poetry?  Forget all those poetry readings you missed out on last year—spring is the season of rebirth, correct?  That’s right, we thought so.   

-Matthew Gentry