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We have a sense today that all of us must “move to survive” as we find ourselves in a world of startlingly rapid and constant change. We continually update our software, change our passwords, and reinvent ourselves while at the same time living under the frightening threat of identity theft. In “Field Trip to the Dead President‘s House,” Intro Awards Winner Emma Hyche points to origins that have been denied: “some slippery identity we can’t find in mirrors or textbooks / or drivers licenses.” Christopher Howell’s poem, “Not Alice,” is a meditation on the precariousness of identity, the loneliness of self-reflection. And in “The Puritans: The Original Cyberbullies,” Caroline Sutton reads the public shaming and isolation of Monica Lewinsky through the lens of The Scarlet Letter, linking Lewinsky’s experience to that of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. She suggests that in the pages of literary print, mass media, and even digital cyber media we find mirrors for ourselves that may be difficult to see, and nearly impossible to own.

In William Snyder Jr.’s “Shoes,” a young boy’s skillful juggling of shoes for sale causes a revolution in the speaker’s view of himself. Like this honest speaker, we find ourselves moving to try to glimpse identity in motion. The speaker in Michael Lavers’s “The Rustle of Hemlock” looks at the waning light of winter when “our earth, / this whole frayed edge of space /seem postscript to a perfect nothingness.” There are the fascinating digital renderings of identity almost seen in Santiago Echeverry’s cybernetic moments of dance and in the undulating motions of Kendall Klym’s story, “The Belly Dance.” There are profound explorations of international displacement expressed in Nancy Chen Long’s portfolio of poems linking Taiwanese-American, scientific-humanistic, creative identities, and even symbolicmathematical language in “Dot Product.” Ira Sukrungruang explores Thai-American nonverbal reflections in “The Dog without a Bark,” from his forthcoming book, Buddha’s Dog. And poet Cathryn Essinger provides a way to close the issue, meditative and aware of motion, in “Reading Basho by Fern Light.” Whether in physical, metaphysical, or cybernetic flux—or all of the above—this is us. This constant movement is who we are now.

Santiago Echeverry. Cabaret: Studio 54 01 (from the Cabaret Series). 2017. Digital print. 48 x 27 inches.