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EDITOR’S NOTES

A Poet’s Directory of Wild Things

The poetry in this anthology responds to the press’s quiet question of what is weird, what is gorgeous, and what is revolutionary. From the first submissions, we started to see an incredible narrative unfolding as poem after poem on
everything from roadkill and refrigerators to fascism and femininity came our way. The conversations between poets — some who are well-known to each other in our home community of Denver, Colorado and plenty who are strangers around the world — emerged in a way that helped me understand more of what humanity is holding in our current moment. Reader, I love this book: while considering the order for the poems, I found myself exclaiming, “I LOVE THIS ONE!” over and over again as I re-encountered the staggering works contained herein. As you read, please let these brave offerings wash over you and be moved to act, to reflect, to write, to share the weird, gorgeous, revolutionary words we’ve woven together.

DEBRA KEANE, EDITOR

The selection criteria for this anthology was any poem which was “weird, gorgeous and revolutionary,” and I think any poet writing and presenting a piece is already inherently those things. It is weird to write in a world which values speed, efficiency, and technology. It is gorgeous to take words out of their normal context of everyday speech and arrange them with intention and feeling. It is revolutionary to see reality from a different angle, and even more so to communicate that which is difficult to describe. I remember what a friend, who would not consider himself a poetry fan, said about a good poem. He said that after hearing a good poem, he doesn’t know what happened, but he senses something feels different. The mood in the room changes after the poet is finished speaking, and you look up from the page with different eyes. Exactly what changes is another question entirely, whether mood, viewpoint, or feeling.

In the end, the poems here may not be easy for me to explain why I chose them, but in all cases, after reading them, I felt something had changed. It could be the psychic feeling of communing with the author and experiencing their world. Or perhaps it was the thrill of letting myself go and continue forward line by line, like getting into the car and taking off. Or maybe the writer’s voice caught my attention until the last words. Perhaps one reason that compels me to keep reading is like what my friend told me: I just want things to be different. I want life to be weird, gorgeous and revolutionary. And the works in this book do that for me.

CHRISTOPHER BULLOCK, EDITOR

Say hush to the world. Put your soft ear to a hard chest. Listen in to a wild poem thumping away. A poem whose muscle turns the wheel that revolves our collective future. For, oh say, one or two minutes max turn off everything but that heartbeat. Whoa. The past shakes off a little. The future retracts its claws. Here is a chance to not be the same you that you were when you entered. A calling to sit down for a human lesson. It’s a little bit of the way “a seashell holds the ocean,” as Aspen Everett says. A little bit of “breath of trees,” as Jessica Rigney tells us. It is Miyamoto’s “warrior in a garden” but I believe even more so, in the era of technocratic fascist media, it is Ashley Ryan Oaks’ “warrior in a war”.

Take the heartbeat of that one wild poem and compound it a few dozen times, and what you have is what you hold in your hands. I hope you’ll listen in. Examine a new room of another human’s heart, along with your own until they are inseparable. Read these wild hearts sideways and slantways and sober as they lay on the page. When your heart is no longer hungry, set down this book. Enough of the heart for now. Go be a pair of hands where they are needed.

BRICE MAIURRO, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

I love poetry for the ways it connects us, how a poem asks with an almost desperation: do you see me? I am so thrilled to have seen and been immersed in all the poems in this incredible collection. I love how a poem is a mirror into someone else’s perspective, but at the core of it, it unites us—if only for a few pages. The call for weird, gorgeous, and revolutionary poems did not disappoint. This collection is full of beauty, oddities, and calls to action. The voices included all demand to be heard, whether it’s an impatient whisper, or setting a fire to demand action.

TYLER HURULA, EDITOR

I’ve never met a poem I didn’t like; every poem tries. Each one opens up, seeking connection and risking rejection. The bravest go on alone, feeling like outsiders, searching for kin. They belong here, in our coterie for the weird, the gorgeous, the revolutionary. It’s apropos, too, ‘weird’ comes from ‘wyrd,’ meaning ‘destiny’—the power to shape fate, to share a common destiny: one action affects all. In this anthology, weird becomes a beautiful revolutionary way to think about life.