Nine Cloud Journal: August 2020

by Vijay R. Nathan (Editor), Scottt Raven (Editor)

Ah, poetry, that beautiful, so called “non-essential,” art form that welcomes its reader to interpret not just the words on the page but the spaces between the words. The idea of “negative capability” that John Keats wrote on is the idea that the poet disappears into their work to transform their views into that of the poem’s subject. In these featured poems, we, as the readers, see themes emerge that go well beyond the personal narrative of each individual poet; this is especially true because there are recurring themes in the collection as a whole. I curated this collection around the idea, prompting the submitters to consider a single central thesis, that “The Personal is Political.” We see many of the poets in this collection in dialogue with identity politics, solitude and silence, senseless violence and trauma, systemic racism, and barriers in interpersonal communication. The poems in this collection welcome us without pretense or cryptic language barriers that many poets employ thus locking their readers from inhabiting the spaces the poem inhabits. Instead, these poems stand together to testify to the collective human experience at the midpoint of 2020, the year that is emerging easily to be the most challenging of our lifetimes.

156 pages, Paperback

Published July 30, 2020