From the Editor
Dear Reader,
Bracken has always been about the woods and the shadows. It seems the sun’s light strikes us more forcefully when it filters through all those dark places.
The glowing trees in this issue’s cover image by Faizan Adil seem to hold a promise of some undiscovered magic. I often feel there’s something incantatory about poetry—that it creates a sense of ritual that dwells with loss but also offers hope.
In a conversation with Bracken editor Jed Myers in this issue, Sati Mookherjee discusses the dialectic structure seen in her poetry manuscript Ars Dialectica. She describes a helix-like shape of contradictions and resolutions that are always being renewed and always evolving. This tension can be felt in her two poems in this issue, “King Tide” and “Native and Invasive.”
I’ve noticed that this issue of Bracken reflects its own contradictions. There are poets here who put their finger on intense moments of joy, as when “the sun funnels / through the dense maples, posits / silver halos on the patio” in Linda Hillman Chayes’ “Lucky.” And in Ann Fisher-Wirth’s “Today,” happiness is felt on a drive on an ordinary Mississippi highway, after picking up “pecans still falling from the trees, / even the ones on the muddy sidewalk.” Yet this issue holds shock and sadness, too, as “rockets—like pilgrims—wander from city to city” in Oleh Kotsarev’s poem “If Only It Were Possible to Remember,” translated by Jill Christensen, and a destructive weather event makes “a giant oak fall / on a house nearby, splitting / the upstairs bedrooms” in Luci Huhn’s “Naming It.”
Even within a single poem there can be a turn where the tone shifts, as the poem contains its own opposites: Rebecca Foust’s “Meyer Lemon” is “sweet / as well as tart” and initiates a bittersweet reflection on love and loss. In Jean Anne Feldeisen’s “New Jersey Pine Barrens,” the speaker saves her sibling (“I was there that time you couldn’t swim, brother, / snatched your hair as you went down”), but the poem’s dedication tells us a young life was still lost. Can we absorb the contradictions held in a poem, in a life? Can we accept that “there is no shape knowing takes / that is not bounded on all sides / by not knowing,” as paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope puts it in Shane Seely’s poem?
Poetry has the power to let us see things in a new way. The visual artists in this issue do the same, showing us unexpected ways of perceiving leaves, flowers, rivers, creeks, and flooded fields. There can be beauty in opposition, or even in decay.
I hope you will enjoy the discoveries awaiting you inside this twelfth issue of Bracken, contradictions and all.
Kate Deimling