Spring 2024
Welcome to the spring 2024 issue of CV2, dear readers.
We’re lucky enough to share in this issue the work of thirty-four outstanding writers. Within these pages, Harrison Wade writes about “a Spring day in Winter,” something with which most of us are becoming all too familiar. Jill M. Talbot tells us “how to pack a poem like it means something,” and you’ll definitely want to stick around to find out why Trevor Graumann’s family “had to throw watermelon away.” One of the youngest poets we’ve ever had the pleasure of featuring, Mazzy Sleep, sets upon us with her “Moth, Moon & Hex,” while the winning poems of this year’s Foster Poetry Prize, as selected by judge Emily Riddle, explore love as ethic, poem as script, land as story, apology as plea. As ever, we’re so excited to share with you all of the work compiled here.
While it always feels good to celebrate poetry and poetic work, in times like these it can also feel difficult to celebrate anything without acknowledging the ongoing atrocities, atrocities that fly in the face of everything the poetic medium works toward, everything we as an organization believe in. Thus, we take this opportunity to reiterate today, tomorrow, and every day, our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We decry the genocide which, as we write this, is still in full force against them.
This issue is full of poems whose thematic forces are peace and respect; whose vocabularies are those of softness and love; whose impulses move unrelentingly toward a practice of care—for others, for the self, for the world. May sentiments like these return to the hearts and move the minds of those set so incomprehensibly upon destruction and harm. Free Palestine.
Chelsea Peters
Editor