Editors’ Page

 editors’ page R eflecting the season, a thread of heat runs coincidentally through the stories and essays in these pages. In a new, beautifully Forsterian story from Robin Black, “The History of the World,” the hot summer countryside of Italy provides the backdrop against which a woman traveling with her twin brother begins to reconcile the muddle of her feelings —frustration, guilt, and love—for him. Benjamin Arda Doty’s heartbreaking “Minute of Angle” takes us through the searing temperatures of Hilla, Mosul, and An Najaf, where a young army sniper contemplates distance, silence, sanity, and love. And amid the fire season of southwestern Colorado, a woman at last finds a way to articulate the reason for leaving her long-troubled marriage in “The Fires We Can’t Control,” by Jill Patterson. In nonfiction, we have “Stories from the Lost Nation,” in which Brendan Wolfe recalls that quintessentially Midwestern summer job, detasseling in hundred-degree weather , while weaving an essay on maps, stories, and, ultimately, trying to know his father. The heat in Marybeth Holleman’s “Thin Line Between” is that of global warming; in this sobering essay, Holleman mourns the fate of polar bears, whose habitat is melting and for whom it is perhaps already too late. Though welcome in May, after a long winter and often unpredictable spring, the heat inevitably becomes by late July— when the summer issue of Colorado Review appears—the guest whose stay has grown a little long, a little tiresome. Find a shady spot somewhere and enjoy the fresh new writing here. —SG —— CRSUM09 fiction.indd 1 5/22/2009 12:33:17 PM colorado review  G reen expanses populate the poems in this summer issue. They are keenly described in Peter Gizzi’s “On Prayer Rugs and a Small History of Portraiture”: I awake to like to light on grass, the ungovernable green of grass lit out this window the day is gorgeous. Where there are green expanses, inevitably there are children playing, and many of these poems explore the pleasures and pains of childhood. A strain of dark playfulness runs through this issue, as exemplified in Andrew Joron’s stunning abecedarium and Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s fabulistic “A Saint among the Stragglers’ Beds.” Perhaps these works signal our entrance into a cautiously hopeful space, one in which wars might end and economies might begin to recover. But poetry does not merely aspire to a previous status quo; it transforms the world through constant questioning. “Amidst the miracle, poetry went on scrutinizing itself,” writes Ange Mlinko. In order to thrive, we need the inquisitive joy found in many of these poems. Welcome , long awaited summer! —sasha steensen CRSUM09 fiction.indd 2 5/22/2009 12:33:17 PM ...