EDITORIAL

We decided to write our editorial as a conversation, or rather as a continuation of the conversation we’ve been having while editing this issue of the magazine.

Hannah Lowe

It was a gift to edit this issue with you, Kim. I’ve just read the final hard copy proofs – the first time I’ve seen every poem, essay and review together – and what struck me is the recurrence of women and women’s lives in poems both by men and women. There’s writing about all facets of the lived realities of women – as mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmothers, as friends and lovers, women in war or women’s bodies. After weeks of commissioning and selecting poems, I was sure there would be broad heterogeneity, so it surprised me. In the lyric essays, we invited the essayists to choose their subject, so again, it interests me that two of them are so directly about women’s experiences. Part of me thinks that our own subjectivities have inevitably, perhaps subconsciously, directed the selections for the issue. I wonder what you think?

Kim Moore

I was so surprised when I started to see those threads linking everything together. I love how the idea of knowing or not knowing is examined in so many of the pieces. So we can move seamlessly from the ‘bewildered wilderness’ of Maya C. Popa’s beautiful essay to Arji Manuelpillai’s