Recently I talked with a friend about the clarity middle age brings to the places we left of our own volition, places we thought we couldn’t go back to, but now we know we could if we made the choice to. What a relief. Of course, leaving is sometimes necessary but it’s a different story when there is room for a return. Bex Hainsworth tells us a version of this in “Coelcanth,” the name of a once thought extinct fish that we learn reappeared in 1938. I am returning from my own / self-imposed exile, she begins. I am swimming upstream: / a coelacanth about to announce / my resurrection. It’s a powerful poem about the passage of time and returning home.

In “A Lean Season” by Zoe Boyer, she tells us, I’m thankless—empty where joy should/have filled me up like a good harvest, my life / a lean season and hunger the only sure thing. Beginning in the backyard on a beautiful October evening, Boyer pulls back from the natural world to address that gratitude is not always possible. The poem continues, I don’t count my blessings, but I can recite / the day’s litany:, finding the balance between practice and truth. 

Trish Hopkinson’s “What of the Work?” centers on the relationship between solitude and great work, and if the solitude of loss would agree with that posit. She writes, Picasso said without great solitude no serious work / is possible. But is there greatness in all forms of solitude? / What of the work we once created while side-by-side? /. While Hopkinson breathtakingly invites us into the current moment of the speaker, lush in detail, her final few lines are transcendent in reply.

Transformation is everywhere / Little fires in the body, writes Melissa Eleftherion in her poem titled with the second phrase. Full of the images and language that free the way for hope: Would I to purge magic / A sound would mouth / Blow a kiss to starlings / Unbow the nearest dark. Perfect for a New Year read and then kept near to read again as needed, Eleftherion reminds us, It’s ok to want things.

David B. Prather’s “Through the Healing Machine” pays homage to the artwork of the same name by Nebraska artist Emery Blagdon (1907 – 1986). For more than thirty years Blagdon built and rearranged an installation of more than 400 works on his family’s farm based on his interest in electropathy and a family history of cancer. Prather takes us back to The Healing Machine before its place in museums on permanent and temporary display, to the shed filled with “pretties” Blagdon created in response to his family’s history with cancer, which eventually found him too, and his desire to pair art and healing for all who visited. From here the poem reveals, We walk / into the darkness of this shed / to find a cure, think of all those / who could use this miracle.

Wishing you and your loved ones a happy new year,

Angela M. Brommel
Editor-in-Chief
Poetry Editor
The Citron Review