Volume 120 Winter/Spring 2026 Guest Editor’s Note
Guest Editor’s Note: On Devotion
I inherited the idea of devotion as religious obligation. That commitment was also a cultural and linguistic one, in response to displacement, as the child of formerly undocumented Polish immigrants. We missed births, weddings, and funerals on the other side of the Atlantic for many years, but participated in the same rituals, uttered the same prayers. In the ornate basilica of my childhood, I grew up lighting candles for relatives I hadn’t met. I prayed for the souls of people I had never touched, who I hoped might visit me in ways unseen after they passed. I was learning about ritual as a form of conversation, and conversation as a form not bound to flesh.
On one hand, I am still moved by rituals of care, methods of grappling with the unknown, the ongoingness and mystery of prayer in my first language. The practice of showing up, again and again, with no guarantees. On the other, I remain vexed by this inheritance, inextricable from obedience. With little room for questioning or critiquing the violent legacy of the church, I was disciplined into ways of living that demanded I betray myself and my desires. I sensed strongly that devotion and obedience were not the same. That the punctuation of devotion includes a question mark.
In my call for submissions to this folio, I posed questions. Inviting poems both nourished and troubled by devotion, I asked, Does devotion chart our path forward? Can it be a weapon? Does devotion protect us, and what from? How is devotion distinct from desire? As obsessed as I am with the idea, I have no answers or definitions. Only questions and ongoing arguments with myself, a growing list of images and associations, experiments. Devotion, whether to God or a beloved or family or an art practice or a cause or an idea (or, &&), seems to have to do with something bigger than us, as the expansive poems here unveil. Bigger, outside of us, and yet—demanding a conversation—a confrontation?—with our interior.
Devotion could be a place inside. Where desire and faith meet. Ideas acted upon. Colliding with doubt and destiny. To devote oneself to anything comes with no guarantees. To enact devotion, to live our devotions, is to contend with Memento mori—that achy knowledge that we will all one day be returned to the earth. I am moved by the polyphonic ways these poems insist on aliveness, on devotion as a verb. They reach, too, for other thinkers, among them June Jordan, Edward Said, Emily Dickinson, Edward Jabès, whose devotion to language refines our questions, and endures.
I am an aspiring devotee. Join me, through these poems. Closer. To phantom and flame. To places in us we have not yet touched.
—Patrycja Humienik
