On Permanence • Curated by Briana Gwin

Part elegy, part prayer, part epistolary masterpiece—Amy Rose Lafty’s “My Father Is a Crab Nebula” is as littered with love and grief as the galaxy is replete with stars. You won’t soon find a more intimate glimpse into the cosmic transcendence of a life lost too soon—and the mourning that comes from being left behind.

Erin Langner is well into adulthood when she is suddenly overcome with nostalgia—and guilt—about her long-since-over childhood obsession with the late R&B icon Aaliyah. In her essay, “The Sound of Absence,” Langner is a reporter and poet both, investigating the psychological phenomena of cultural erasure while also penning a heart-achingly tender ode to the things we love and lose, and the things time begs us to leave behind.

The gift of Jeni Prater’s poems is their effortless ability to render the mundane a miracle, the invisible seen, and the “unconventional” a beautiful new future. As her words search for life, sifting through the complexities of biology and bureaucracy both, her readers are unwittingly captivated by the tenderness of her tireless pursuit.

Madeleine Bazil’s poems toe the line between tenderness and unabashed longing. Intimate, urgent, prismatic—yet unassumingly brief—every word is threaded together with the precision of fate, and every stanza is a carefully-crafted room within the palace of the speaker’s vivid memory.

Everywhere in Natasha Loewy’s art, the ordinary and discarded are transmogrified into affective (re)creations that toe the line between tension and fragility, levity and weight, and joy and grief. Despite a wide range of materials used, Loewy’s larger body of work boldly rejects the notion that “good” art will stand the test of time; on the contrary, many of her creations are designed not to resist, but to relent to the passage of time, as all natural things do.

In a world where writers operate within the confines of page and word limits, Sionnain Buckley is a visionary without regard for parameters. In her poem, “The Time-Space Synesthete Draws You a Picture of What You Can’t See” Buckley renders a world where time has a shape, where every word has weight, and where the experience of glimpsing through the speaker’s vast, synesthetic scope will leave an indelible impression in your worldview.

Savannah Bowen’s La-Pa-La tells the story of two young siblings living in Haiti—one of whom must grapple with the mysterious disappearance of the other. As the surreal begins to eclipse the real, a beautiful unraveling takes hold, leaving readers to wonder whether love may be the only certainty in this or any universe.

In her dazzling suite of text poems, image poems, and art, Tina Lentz-McMillan designates the negative space in every page as an intimate collaborator in her story. Her speaker is an un-silenced witness: of obsession, desire, and the ache of longing—and of what (and who) lives on even in the liminal territory of erasure.

Teri Vela’s “Superstition Sonnet” invites readers to dispense with everything they think they know about the sonnet. It is not the rules of a form, but the warp and weft of intergenerational violence and prevailing softness that tethers these intricate lines together into a powerful reverse origin story.