Each October the Las Vegas Book Festival is held at the Historic Fifth Street School. This year featured a panel with the Western State Poets Laureate, which included Lee Herrick (California), Sean P. Griffin (Nevada), Lisa Bickmore (Utah), and Christo Apache (Colorado). Reading poetry is a joy, but hearing it read by the poet has palpable magic as the poet and audience enter the world of the poem together.

As a child, I remember learning about poets like Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay who traveled by train across America to lecture and read their work. Unless you hear a poet read their work, you might not catch the expansiveness of a line or the subtle sense of humor or whimsy.  Whenever a video of Mary Oliver reading her work pops up on my social media feed, I listen to it. There are moments in a Mary Oliver poem where a single word opens up an entirely new universe.

The five poets featured in this issue illustrate the expansiveness of poetry in their well crafted works: “Living in a Male Body” by Tyler Lemley, “Small Re-beginnings” and “A letter home” by Sean Cho A., “ghost resin” by Stacey C. Johnson, “Wonder” by Kate Morning, and “Eyewitness Accounts” by Carly Turnidge. These poems invite us to visit them more than once,  to find our place in the ever-changing universe.

Wishing you autumnal magic,
Angela M. Brommel
Editor-in-Chief
Poetry Editor
The Citron Review