Seasons have long preoccupied the poetic mind and images of winter, spring, summer and autumn punctuate this issue. Yet, things are often not as they seem. Despite the frozen open that Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe plunges us into, we find ourselves in spring, where ‘colours lie in wait like landmines’. Though at first Małgorzata Lebda’s delicious autumnal list, as translated by Mira Rosenthal, may remind us of Keats’s ode, her bounty reaps ‘the exploitation of Ghana’ alongside the season’s indulgences. And Kim Crowder builds a do- mestic, almost nostalgic, image of pink purslane in bloom, only to overturn it completely with an allusion to human cruelty.

Such seasonal imagery is being used to unsettle the reader; in Yasmine Seale’s words, it is ‘on the verge of a crime of passion’. Across the issue, it creates an atmospheric framework for representations of systemic violence. Medha Singh’s ‘Birthdays’ delivers a devastating rendition of the enforced separation of mothers and children at the Mexican border, while poet and community leader Hubert Matiúwàa depicts the abduction of boys by organised crime syndicates in Guerrero in his poem ‘The boy’. Translated by Juana Adcock, Matiúwàa’s poems are accompanied by an interview where he and Patrick Romero McCafferty discuss poetry as ‘born out of the community’s material and spiritual needs.’ Writing in a region whose languages, cosmology, and agricultural practices are being erased through poppy production and mining concessions, for Matiúwaà ‘poetry becomes our means of naming our reality’.

So too for Esraa Husain, who tells Eloise Birtwhistle that their experiences of immigration have moved them ‘towards writing as a testimony; witnessing.’ Alongside their writing practices, Husain and Matiúwaà run community projects in Glasgow and Guerrero respectively. Both of their interviews share insights about self-organising and publishing, and Husain observes that for many of us, poetry is an abundant source of community in itself, both in the kinship we feel through a shared practice and through live nights, workshops, and presses who identify and act on collective needs. Clara-Læïla Laudette reviews two recent pamphlets from one such outfit, fourteen poems, a publisher of queer poetry in London.

In conversation with Charles Lang, Colin Bramwell and Ellen Renton discuss how their collaborative work draws connections between different artists and art forms, and indeed, through the work of translation, between different po- etic traditions. For Renton and Bramwell the act of writing for oneself neces- sarily becomes an engagement with others – just as when they come to think of performing as ‘an unwitting collaboration’ determined by ‘who you end up on a line up with, who’s in the audience’.

More straightforwardly, communities are found in neighbourhoods; in the cul de sac of Catherine Wilson Garry’s poem where ‘the neighbours // are twitching their curtains’, or alongside the foxes of Clara-Læïla Laudette’s, who carry ‘the extravagance of their grief ’. Any thorough look at commonality will encompass separation too. In Dan Power’s exceptional ‘dogworld’, a dog ‘tied to a bollard / is an island’. The island of Samuel Tongue’s poem fears abandonment to ‘the great experiment of language’. Meanwhile Maria Sledmere wobbles the ‘loneliness of total / Language in everything’.

Standing apart needn’t always mean something is wrong. Indeed it’s distance that enables poems included here to move between pages and rooms, the granular and the astronomical, from Christie Williamson’s ‘atom’s spleet’ to Dipanjali Roy writing that ‘for a while there was. A planet & I was so much of myself in it’. Oscillating between the intimate and the collective, many of the poems in this issue speak with such intimacy that they flip over into tran- scendence. The most personal is often the most universal, which is testament to the integrity with which the poets speak to us. They use the word ‘love’ where love is meant, as we see with gentian rhosa’s sunflowers that ‘bow again and again into love’.

In the natural world and the seemingly static, bordered space of the poem, peace and menace come to complete each other. For Ingrid Bringas, translated by Don Cellini, tenderness ‘works its way into the days / the sunspot of your body / where you grow only shade already’. Everything is becoming, or always has been, something else. Heidi Williamson’s ‘The woman who turned to dust in the frost’ asks ‘how long the moment lasted while she was in it.’

The moment of a poem, often unquantifiable, can be miraculous: an openwork of attention that has managed to settle on an uneasy world. John Glenday’s red admiral butterflies that close our issue may be read as poems themselves, flying ‘to the last place on earth you’d expect them to be going / till suddenly they’re there’.

Eloise Birtwhistle, Charles Lang, Nasim Luczaj, & Patrick Romero McCafferty, August 2025