Dear Readers,
This is our first chance to wish you a happy New Year, in this new decade. And we mean it when we say that we wish you health, vitality and good poetry in the days and years ahead. We know how lucky we are to remain in conversation with so many of you about poetry and art.
In November, we hosted the Inaugural Radar Poetry Retreat. This 3-day deep-dive into poetics exceeded our great expectations. All the poets who joined us have become valued members of our Radar community. We thank Vancouver-based Guest Poet, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, for sharing her warmth and brilliance on retreat.
More than five years into our project called Radar Poetry, we look around (virtually) and see a community of writers, readers, and artists of which we are proud to call ourselves members. We have always and will continue to read all submissions blind – meaning that we do not access the name of the poet until we have voted on the poems submitted. As the volume of submissions we receive every week continues to multiply like rabbits in heat, we hold fast to our original commitment to you: every submission will be read, discussed, and responded to within one month. This commitment presents obvious challenges as we happily garner the attention of fine poets around the globe. So far, we have been able to manage by closing our submissions to new work for short periods of time throughout the year. We’ll let you know if that changes.
Issue 25 is chock-full of amazing poems, accompanied by artwork meant to elevate, complicate, and communicate with your reading experience. In the process of selecting work for Issue 25, we were reminded, as we are every time we log in to our Submittable account, of how many gifted poets chime in from so many different locations, stages of life, and points of view.
Happy reading, a thousand times thank-you, and stay tuned!
—Dara-Lyn Shrager and Rachel Marie Patterson, Editors