Summer 2024
Summer 2024. Vol. 47 No.1
While I write this note, spring is ending and my life is blooming with uncertainty. It’s been a strange year—which I feel like I’ve said of every year for the last decade. But 2024 has me particularly unmoored, partly because of the general state of the world, and partly because many of the tunnels toward more stable futures I was meep meeping toward have revealed themselves as Wile E Coyote-painted murals on the sides of mountains.
I feel as though I’m teetering on the cusp of something—but whether it’s something good or bad, I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that this is one of those phases when poems are uniquely suited to keep me from floating into some too-dark quadrant. Or, rather, when poems can help me float in a brighter direction.
The poems in this summer issue of CV2 run the gamut: from beautifully observant poems by Tazi Rodrigues, Katherine Kallas, Natalie Rice, and Gwen Aube, strange delights from Shahe Mankerian, Kari Teicher, Rose Zinnia, and Lee Suksi, to emotionally heavy work from Anna Veprinska, Pete Bock, Aman Rahman, and Kimberley Orton.
I can promise nothing, but I do hope that you will find these poems—and the plethora I don’t have space to list off here—will carry you someplace bright, as they have been carrying me.
Meep meep,
John Elizabeth Stintzi