Volume 30, Issue 1 (2016)

Reader,

I have learned a lot from editing the review this fall, but I think now more than ever I appreciate the voice. Not one singular voice, not only those I agree with, but the abstract voice — that narrator, that imagined author, the person who reads aloud to me in my head — because it has an important power. It has shown me things that I cannot see from my perspective, and I have been caught selfish, guilty, and wrong by this voice. It has made me a better human.

I chose to place "Black & Unarmed" on the first page of this collection — not the first page of the poetry section, not the first page after the table of contents, but the first page — because I believe we collectively need to listen to this voice, give it the time you give to your phone when you first wake up, to the ingredients list on the cereal box, to the expiration date of your milk.

Listening is not listening anymore. It has become strangely conflated with hearing, with an involuntary notice of a sound. Listening, in the way I ask you to listen, involves more than hearing and understanding the words, and understanding what they mean. To listen is to give your time, your eyes, your still hands holding the page, or rested gently in your lap. It is treating the voice as the only object in the room for some time. I have amazed myself by listening, and that is all I ask of anyone.