Editors’ Page

We prepare this issue for the printer just as summer slips through our grasp, giving way to fall, the season that requires us to let go, to give up, to give in. We put away the things of sultry afternoons and glorious, sun-stretched evenings, begin to prepare for the shorter days, the early frosts, the long march through the cool and into the cold. That note of loss sounds through this issue’s stories and essays. In Farah Ali’s “Heroes,” winner of the 2016 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Gish Jen, a mother mourning her murdered son tries to reconcile some painful truths about him with her need to grieve. Karin Cecile Davidson’s “Rock Salt and Rabbit” concerns a Vietnam veteran’s coming to terms with the loss of a limb and the estrangement of his family upon his return. In Nina de Gramont’s “The Inconsistency of Sunlight,” a woman without custody of her young daughter must, amid blurring boundaries, withdraw from her relationship with a neglected neighbor child. And in Emily Temple’s “Better Homes,” a woman devastated by her divorce immerses herself in the bizarre world of extreme sandcastle competition and learns to accept her losses. Kelcey Parker Ervick’s essay “My Viking Name” examines the convention of women giving up their so-called maiden names and suggests that it’s time to reconsider the term. Susan Triemert looks to break with her family’s tradition of silence when faced with grief as she recalls a long-ago tragedy in “Indian Summer.” And in “Witness,” Rose Whitmore revisits the anxiety—and the wonder—of a childhood spent with adventurous parents in the great outdoors: learning to let go of fear, lean into the openness of the landscape, and accept the unseen and unknown.

Welcome to the fall/winter issue; having let go, perhaps, of your own attachments this season, let us replenish you.

—stephanie g’schwind

To hearten the Vandals (or silence the lambs), it’s Yogi Berra time, it’s “deja vu all over again”: another fall, another election cycle. As I write this, fact-checking swallows are twittering the skies of the 2016 American presidential election. I am alarmed. To say there’s been so much surreality, so much violence of late, is to understate the obvious. Earth’s got a wobble, our country’s got a gun, or as Jaswinder Bolina tells us chillingly in this issue, “You do the murder too easy, habibi, like an American / spewing lunatic with three rifles in a theater.” What to do? What is the poet to do?

The polymath poet/architect/healer/activist Robert Kocik declares “poetry is the hallucination of unrestricted literacy.” A number of brilliant and beautiful strategies are at work in this issue that suggest it just might be possible. From diagnosis to elegy, distillation to empathy, there’s ample proof of language’s capacity for resistance (and clarity). Try the linguistic anodyne of Katy Lederer’s “Inflammation,” or Rusty Morrison’s “drift intervals.”

Try Daniel Eltringham’s brotherly “Sheffield Shanty”: “Love, then, / like photoynthesis / like breathing, is precious / but needful, it always distorts / the meaning.” Or the pure discovery of Rachelle Wales’s first publication, a suite of poems that should silence the clowns. Try the place-based soundings of Thibault Raoult, William Brewer, and Jennifer Foerster. Or the intense phenomenal concentration of such offerings as Martha Ronk’s “The shape of silence,” Merrill Gilfillan’s “Sarcee Horses,” or Joshua McKinney’s “Inspecting a Patch of Grass in the Backyard, I Delight in My Senses, Get Distracted by Thought, Then Enjoy My Senses Again.” Language is acutely awake in the poems of this fall issue of Colorado Review. May it show itself, a bearing, may it carry us into this becoming moment of history.

—matthew cooperman