Featured in this Folio
- Wakaya Wells
- Veronica Fletcher
- Tsong Chang
- Trina Young
- Sascha Cohen
- Sarah Adeyemo
- Sadie Forkner
- Rooja Mohassessy
- Rachel Betesh
- Musu Bangura
- Meg Johnson
- Leonora Dora Donovan
- Lavinia Liang
- Laura Da’
- Klein Voorhees
- Jose Hernandez Diaz
- Jessica Thiru
- Hunter A Allund
- Gem Blackthorn
- Fizza Abbas
- Dawn Tefft
- Colleen Farrelly
- Clifton Gachagua
- Christie Chiu
- Ava Clare Ng
It interests me, the patience we have for the things we do not understand. This world. So, naturally as a poet, I am forever trapped in the “wrong” image, the rough line, even the insoluble subject matter—however far the eyes can imagine. In this ongoing negotiation, I have come to accept two things: it is easy to find a strange thing in the familiar but it is not so easy to find a familiar in the strange thing. Is it not funny how this too causes us to return, asks us to stay, that hole in the river?
The following lines culled from poems in this issue exposes what I mean:
“every body is a bonfire
a light of living things”
—Musu Bangura, ‘song of the fascist state’
“When I say “love,” I mean we
must love the girl and her horn, but not the conditions that
led to the horn.”
—Dawn Tefft, ‘I Draped Myself in Wolves’
“the love
of eleven stillborn babies,
like fire in her belly,”
—Fizza Abbas, ‘White Limestone Is A Perfect Excuse for Pica’
“Everyone here is here & so beautiful I could die”
—Sadie Forkner, ‘(trans)itive’
Used to what fits, it is hard to stay in the strange. Despite, despite. Across this issue, in five different poems, there are five images / metaphors that employ the sun. Each of these seem to arrive in reinvention. Now, I am thinking of the idea that the reader is the co-author to a piece of writing. To set the tone, I will leave you with a new line I made, borrowed from Trina Young’s ‘2005 Bildungsroman’ & Clifton Gachagua’s ‘some instructions for the canonisation’, Better the defiance begins now, let us see what we can co-author.
I Echo
October 2026
ANMLY #43 Poetry Team
Sarah Clark, Poetry Editor
Sonia Beauchamp, Assistant Poetry Editor
James O’Leary, Assistant Poetry Editor
Allison Thung, Assistant Poetry Editor
leena aboutaleb, Poetry & Nonfiction Reader
Brittni Braswell, Poetry Reader
tripp j crouse, Poetry Reader
Aylli Cortez, Poetry Reader
sara h. hammami, Poetry & Nonfiction Reader
I Echo, Poetry Reader
Eros Livieratos, Poetry Reader
G.H. Plaag, Poetry Reader
Ashish Kumar Singh, Poetry Reader
Jacqui Zeng, Poetry Reader