12 November 2025
My new home state, Georgia, and I continue to grow into each other. The first lasting impression came early, on the shuttle from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport to Athens. The coast-to-coast trip between LAX and ATL is not easy, especially when eastbound and sleep-deprived from a one-year-old, with the weight of an important campus visit on my shoulders. Huddled into the back corner of a half-filled shuttle, I zoned out of the window, delirious with a trying travel day and vertiginous from the stands of pines shot up into the dusk. I boarded in Los Angeles, a land generally horizontal in its disposition, where the tall trees stand only singularly, by design, and mostly as bare lines up to the palms. Here, once you leave Hartsfield-Jackson’s circle, the stretch leading to the highway is walled on both sides by greenery. The first sign to reach above the tree line was a burgundy and white one beaming drury inn & suites, my son’s name (Drury, not Inn or Suites) in literal bright lights. Ever the superstitious Taiwanese person, I took it as an auspicious sign for the visit.
This does not necessarily mean that a deity placed the sign there to foreshadow an eventual future with my son, Drury Maa, in Georgia, though the jury is still out. One of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson is 685, quoted in whole:
Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes—
For life, poetry, spiritual existence—all that constitutes the looming absence that serves as the truncated hymnal stanza’s unarticulated subject, we, dear Emily asserts, mistake transcendence as an experience waiting for us rather than one made out of our phenomenal existence. “Revelation” is not so much the fall to the ground, per se. Rather, it is Saul’s battered body, the voices, and the vision (and lack thereof), which prompted a sense-making—and even a communal one, with Ananias (cf. Dickinson’s “our”)—that led to the paradigmatic conversion. Dickinson’s first line disabuses us with a choppy line, crowded with punctuation and halting with prominent iambs. This sets up a contrast with the second line, which feels like a relief, and a release, with its string of diaphanous u’s and soft consonants, generating a felt sense of the spaciousness that is available for the eyes, for a spiritual life driven by attentiveness to the material world around us, in community. I saw the hotel sign placed by Drury Hotel’s corporate office. It helped me suit up the next day and prepared me to be present for all the day’s happenings, which ultimately changed my life.
The art folio for this issue presents an afterlife of the phenomenal world for Beverly Buchanan, who lived in Athens, Georgia, from 1987 into the twenty-first century. Curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper put together a moving and beautiful exhibit for their fellow artist and Athenian. Through ephemera, artfully curated and mounted, we have a point of access to the daily life behind a stellar career. Essays by Bryn Ashley Evans, Patricia Ekpo, and the curators also shed light on how Buchanan’s body and all its registers made art and a life that attended to her surroundings in a way that can speak to us today.
I also encourage you to read Joshua Rivkin’s masterful essay that thinks through family, grief, and inheritance, particularly by way of Jewish rites of passage. Carol Frost’s poems also explore end of life with loved ones; the last in the folio shakes me to the core. Please also read Edward Salem’s powerful poems, especially “Saleh,” a portrait of rescue and voice as powerful, touching, and absurd as the historical moment demands. Read the winner and runner-up of last year’s prose prize, Rochelle L. Johnson and Rosa Boshier González, respectively. Carter Sickels shares a love story you can’t miss. And Sean Sam publishes a story about Indigenous self-reckoning phenomenal in its make-up.
Outside the Office:
• This year’s prose prize is now open until 15 January. The judge is Kiese Laymon, award-winning author of the novel Long Division and the memoir Heavy, among other books.
• We hope to see some of you in March at AWP Baltimore.
• Our spring events include a reading with Brenda Iijima and Saretta Morgan on 7 February in Athens. We will also be collaborating with the Institute for African American Studies again for a reading with Jamel Brinkley and Tarfia Faizullah on 2 April. Free and open to the public, as always.
In the immediate wake of our UGA Poetry Fest (my heart is so full; thanks to all who came), I can’t stop thinking about how strange a phenomenon poetry is. During the magical Q&A with Robin Coste Lewis and Edward Hirsch, Lewis stated that she has started to think about “diaspora” more in terms of being found, than strictly in terms of being scattered, though the former encapsulates the latter. A theme throughout the festival was poets finding the inspiration that set them on their respective paths in the unlikeliest of places. For Michael Collier, John Donne in a boxing ring (not entirely certain if purely figurative or literal); for Hirsch, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s terrible sonnets alone in a dorm room in Iowa; for Lewis, C. P. Cavafy with a beloved out in a park in south LA. Poetry, literature in whole, is a phenomenon that can find you wherever you are, scattered about, and change your life, like that, instantly. It instigates a whole world of richly layered phenomena to meet you, wherever “here” is. I suggest that a wider proliferation of literary reading might offset, directly and in some meaningful way, the isolation we all seem to agree is too pervasive now.
G.M.
