A Word from Marcela Huerta, Poetry Editor
This being my last issue editing carte blanche, I thought I’d take a minute to wrap things up, emotionally speaking, and thank every poet I was lucky enough to publish, from issue 37 through issue 45. When I first interviewed for the position, Greg asked me who was someone whose work I thought resonated with the theme from the upcoming issue (“Borders”). Natalie Wee immediately came to mind, whose writing often straddles multiple nation-states and her place within them. Her piece, “Frequent Flyer Program,” was the first poem I ever solicited for a magazine. Soliciting for carte blanche was always very special for me, because of the way it allowed me to highlight the writers whose poetry has helped me understand the world. Simone Person’s “Chet Hanks Explains How, if You Think About it, We’re All Africans,” with its incisive and astute examinations of white supremacy and celebrity, was a guiding light for the rest of that issue’s poetry selections, and for this, my final issue, I had the pleasure of soliciting a poem by T. Liem, whose work has always guided me as a writer and as a human being. Their book, Slows: Twice, came out this past May, and while I didn’t get a chance to publish anything from that manuscript (due to the running theme of my own miserable timing), I did get to have “THE WATER ON MARS VANISHED THIS MIGHT BE WHERE IT WENT” with its vast universes of time, both lost and cherished. Over the years I’ve felt myself drawn to poets speaking on themes of class, of race, of labour, of sexuality, of loss. I've felt lucky to publish Latine poets in the diaspora, like Laura Mota and Marcy Rae Henry. Every new perspective has helped reorient my views on language and art and life.
There were poets I wanted to publish but couldn’t due to space, or geographic constraints. There were poems that felt so electrifyingly memorable I felt stunned they hadn't already been snatched up (I’m thinking specifically about Khashayar Mohammadi’s “Psychotic’s Prayer or the Sufi Path to Synthetic Nihilo”) There were always dozens of poems I’d think about after my final selection was made. Poems written by teenagers that had so much depth and character, poems written by people who had never submitted to a magazine before, but who felt like they were already so grounded in their poetic voice. It was always such a gift to get to immerse myself in their worlds and the worlds of the speakers from their poems. So thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy this final issue, it’s been complicated and joyful and a lot in between.