Editors’ Page

1 EDITORS’ PAGE F eatured among this issue’s essays, Jessica McCaughey’s “Aligning the Internal Compass” echoes themes and variations in the other essays and stories here: making our way across unfamiliar territory, getting lost, losing things, losing ourselves, and finding our way again. McCaughey’s piece delves into the mysteries of why some of us are adept at finding our way in this world while others struggle to get from here to there—with or without a map. In both Mary Medlin’s “Not Now but Soon” and Victoria Sprow-Kelly’s “All the Ways We Say Goodbye,” characters navigate the landscape of grief, and in Erin Flanagan’s “Dog People,” a woman tries to find her bearings in her role as a new mother. Nancy McCabe’s essay “The Art of Losing” explores the anguish of losing something treasured and the exhilaration of finding it again. Contributing editor Steven Church writes about the disorientation of returning to a place so well known to him and now rendered unrecognizable in “After the Storm.” And in “René,” Anne McDuffie revisits a year in Spain when she traveled, and often stumbled, into the new terrains of romance, foreign culture, and ultimately adulthood. Welcome to the new issue; we hope you lose yourself in the fine stories, essays, poems, and book reviews. —sg —— colorado review 2 U nique among the springtimes I have known, this spring remains at odds with the angers, grief, and poverty of winter. It is almost as though spring were reluctant to make what might in bad faith be the usual, greeny promises. Mark Irwin notes this reluctance in a figure of Christ; Rebecca Lindenberg does as much in her still-life. And keenly, Julie Paegle profuses a monody in memory of a friend to many of us, poet Craig Arnold, lost to us all. May the poems in this issue give us the courage truly to welcome a perplexing spring. —donald revell ...