The Summer ‘25 issue of the Newsletter sets the record straight severalfold. In Karim Kazemi’s interview with Linda Rosenkrantz, she clarifies that most of us have been pronouncing Peter Hujar’s name incorrectly: “HUGE-ar is how Peter would say it.” 100 years after its original publication, Eliza Browning revisits Nancy Cunard’s Parallax, derided by most critics at the time as little more than a T.S. Eliot knockoff. It’s never too late to challenge consensus and shake culture up a bit.
At the same time these pieces retread and complicate existing conversation, they also take us into the future. We have poems by current Emerge—Surface—Be Fellows Dina Abdulhadi, angela abiodun, and Alexandra Egan, fiction by Shiv Kotecha (for—and channeling—Kevin Killian), and E.R. Pulgar’s interview with Laura Cárdenas Armas and María Mercedes Cobo Echenagucia, co-editors of Poesía Afrovenozolana, a new, bilingual anthology of poetry and theory written by Black Venezuelan women. As Cárdenas Armas explains regarding publishing and editorship, “If there are no Black women, there is a very clear message that Black women do not produce knowledge.” Between print and online, this conversation is available in both English and the original Spanish.
We’re proud to feature three poems by Palestinian women with Israeli citizenship—all current students or recent graduates of Israeli universities—self-identifying as ‘48 Palestinians. In “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” Maryam Kanaan (under pseudonym) writes, “You have your gun. I have my voice/ Your fingers twitch for blood. Mine for action.” I know that publishing can’t bring anyone back or undo the ever-escalating inhumanity of genocide and its methods, but what it does offer is clarity, resistance against erasure, and, hopefully, a bit more strength to keep fighting.
This issue also memorializes Joshua Clover, Matty D’Angelo, and Alice Notley, each beloved by The Poetry Project and by so many who commune around the study, presentation, and love of poetry. May these remembrances provide comfort in the midst of immeasurable loss, and may we keep each other close—deceased and living alike—through deep attention, deep engagement.
