Volume 117 Winter/Spring 2023 Guest Editor’s Note
Home & Hiraeth
When I think of home, I’m reminded of a quote by poet Elaine Kahn: “When my mom left her first (of 3) husbands, she melted down her wedding ring & made it into a turtle to remind her that home exists in ur body.” I’m reminded how the body can be a safe place but also a site of betrayal, how it’s a place we’ll all have to abandon. In this way, I’m reminded that home is a feeling that shifts, how we’re always looking to find footing in a place we’ll have to leave.
I made the call for poems about home and hiraeth expecting to step into houses filled with tchotchkes, to meander coasts on the shorelines of memory. And I did. But in editing this folio, I also found myself steeped in poems populated by people—coffeeshop strangers and playground-drunk kids. There were words locked and lost on tongues, hands hungry for our ancestors, beings on the brink of exiting this realm.
There were so many more poems that I admired than could include, but the ones I chose I did not only for their individual merits but for the ways in which they conversed with each other across time, locale, and language. In them, I felt rooted in the experience of despair and hope, as together we remember what it is to settle into a body, a place, a person; what it is to know them, in beauty or horror of their fully realized state; what it is to lose them.
I hope you enjoy reading this series of poems as much as I enjoyed curating it—with a deep sense of honor to be present in the Florida rain, the Minnesota cold, the Roman sunset; the slaughtered ram, the food-stained plates, the ghosts in us and landscapes; the places we can never return, the places that fail us, and the places we will always find inside ourselves.
With light,
Chet’la
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study, awarded the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets,and Mistress, awarded the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. She has been awarded fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo, and her work has appeared in The Yale Review, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, and Guernica. In January 2023, she’ll join the faculty at George Washington University as an assistant professor of English.
To purchase Volume 117 Winter/Spring 2023 featuring Chet’la’s guest edited folio, click here.
