First, I’d like to introduce you to Marilyn Taylor, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. You will quickly find that Ms Taylor is an ardent lover of formal poetry. In her interview, she explains the excitement that she gets from writing in form and from sharing her work with others. Her poems demonstrate her success in many different forms, including a sonnet that lightheartedly pokes fun at the use of form and a glose that tears into the lies pervading society. Marilyn’s poems are serious, sad, angry, and fun—sometimes all at the same time. I’m always grateful to find poets like Marilyn who love and are excited by writing, reading, and sharing poetry.

Dede Cummings’ poem “Die Lügen” gives me chills each time I read it. Here, truth and lies from the Holocaust continue to haunt those who live and those who lived. In this poem, we are reminded that we, too, are the haunted, remembering and discovering how horrifying humanity can be.

Annie Boutelle graces our pages this month with five ekphrastic persona poems in the voice of Caravaggio. These poems are bold, seductive, and sensual, and Boutelle has crafted each line with stunning care. I love the excited, bawdy, deeply human way that irreverence mixes with  reverence in these poems.

Susan Martinello brings us two poems that share a sense of fragility of the self and of relationships. The first uses a lovely metaphor to show a mother’s attempts to keep her children’s lives near and interconnected with her own. The second employs the metaphor of seeds’ growth—and growth of one thing always means something must change, maybe even die—even the seeds themselves, as they merge with the soil to grow.

At this point, I’d like to introduce you to someone you’ll undoubtedly hear a lot about in the future: our shiny new Associate Poetry Editor, Nicelle Davis:

Dear readers and artists, it is great to be born into the Connotation Press family! It has been a great privilege to read submissions and be privy to poems I might have never found otherwise. It seems as though my childhood dream of becoming a pirate is finally coming true as, in every submission, I find lines that shine like treasure. In the end I settled on two precious stones for this issue of Connotation Press: the diamonds of Peter Schwartz and the sapphires of Tania Pryputniewicz.

Peter Schwartz’s poetry is a constant surprise. The way a diamond catches light to create a spectrum of color in its transparent belly, Schwartz’s words promise to give readers the delights of word play while grappling with humanity’s most serious questions. His questions only lead to more questions as he admits, “I've got a silhouette of dry reasons and a silhouette of near limitless doubt.” Being the pirate that I am, I can’t help but admire the fire, depth, and strength of Schwartz’s poetry.

Tania Pryputniewicz brings the depth of the ocean with her gleaming sapphire collaboration with talented photographer Robyn Beattie. These women combine their visions to create a soulful elegy for their friend who died in the prime of life. The amount of life brimming in the lines and images of this work makes death seem more like a process than a loss. These women bring to readers the greatest treasure: sympathy.

It is a great honor for me to offer these treasures to you. Thank you, reader, for letting me be your pirate, too. I intend to pillage and plunder the goods of the seven (internet) seas to bring the best words to you.

Arrg and love,
Nicelle Davis

Please join us in welcoming all the wonderful artists we have the pleasure of presenting in this issue. I hope you have a fine time with their poems. We sure have.  And welcome to Nicelle. It’s great to have her with us. Enjoy!