This is something of a bumper edition, filled with excellent works in prose and in poetry. We found it a very powerful work to edit, with a definite trend toward writing that engages with and/or critiques the contemporary world.

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The poems submitted this time—both those selected for publication, and those regretfully declined—had a strong focus on a world that is wider than the merely human. There are poems about dogs, and rocks, about the ontology of storms, or the aspirations of birds and clouds and trees. There is growing evidence of empathic connections between humans and the rest of this planet, and that empathy is definitely present in so many contemporary poems—so many that we are tempted to say there is no real need to talk about ecopoetry now because so many poems are living and breathing in that framework.

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For both poems and prose, there was also a very clear tendency to write in ways that reflect on connections between humans; or on the relationship a person might have with their own complicated multiple selves; or on the relationship between the ancient (or more recent) past and the present; or, in a few works, the anguish of brutality, from personal insult to the horrors of war.

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The use of form also captured our attention, in prose and in poetry, with the presence of a kind of material poetics in both forms. Authors presented prose poems, haiku, and sigo; features of flash fiction, experimental language; and the exploration of the use of white space around the black type of the words. It’s almost as though the gap between prose and poetry is disappearing, or at least becoming more diffuse.

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What we particularly love about editing Meniscus is that each issue puts on record the sorts of social, human, ecological, and political issues that are inflecting our shared experiences of this wide world. In this issue, again we see the impassioned, engaged, and highly diverse ways in which authors claim a space to speak.