Editors’ Page

1 EDITORS’ PAGE I n the summer’s heat, in the season of cross-country road trips, three-day-weekend visits, and family reunions, we sometimes desire a little distance from one another, a bit of space, a spot of shade. And yet the thread running through this issue’s prose is one of human connection. In Candice Morrow’s “Touch,” a couple and a teenaged girl attempt, fail, and try again at creating connections with one another in an orbit around the couple’s infant daughter. The characters in Martin Cozza’s filmically perspected and aptly titled “Pennsylvania Polka” move toward each other, then away from and back again, in a heartbreaking kind of dance. Melissa Lambert, winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2009–10 Intro Journals Award, paints a rich portrait of a family’s nine children cleaving together as things come apart amid third-world poverty and despair . In Rachel Jackson’s essay “Hellcat Court,” the author, a “white, middle-class navy wife,” explores the push and pull of living in community with others. “Songs Primarily in the Key of Life,” an essay by Brian Kevin, tenderly re-examines the story of the Peoples Temple, a group whose members were seeking a connection with others, through the critical review of a little-known album recorded by the cult in 1973. And in Anis Shivani’s interview with Dave Eggers, we hear about Eggers’ experience in writing Zeitoun, a book that details the arrest and imprisonment of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, an innocent man caught up in the chaos of Hurricane Katrina, a time when the New Orleans community came apart and the normal fabric of human connections was shredded. Embrace those who seek out your company this summer, and then find a cool, quiet spot to enjoy this issue. —sg colorado review 2 S ometime around the year 1879, Emily Dickinson wrote the following lines, in pencil, on a scrap of stationery: To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a book it lie— True Poems flee— Meteorologically, summer is marked first by the lengthening day and then by the diminishing day. So many of the poems in this issue strive to exist in the fleeting moment where night and day are on the same plane, where together, they shed some light darkness on one another. The sun(set) is, as Arda Collins insists, “coming and coming away.” In the face of this brevity, these poems present us with a sense of urgency to work, often collaboratively, in the exact location and time where we find ourselves. To be “in the sun,” as Lily Brown succinctly puts it, is to be “worked by the sun.” May the heat these poems generate , radiate. —sasha steensen ...