As I write this note there remains a little over one week before 2026’s vernal equinox, the official end of a particularly dramatic New York winter. I’ll remember the astonishingly narrow paths carved into our snowy sidewalks, the brutal back-to-back-to-back-to-back days of below freezing temperatures, and the many negligent dog parents who decided that the brown tones and textures of their pets’ excretions would make the perfect garnish for our white cityscape (white-ish, anyway). The weather is a conversation we’re having with one another all of the time, and since conversation is at the core of what goes on at The Poetry Project, I can’t help but defend it as a worthy subject. A bit of small talk can be the spark that leads to big ideas and novel connections, and lucky for us, this issue has both in spades.
Our “Networks of Value” feature gathers four responses written around The Palestinian Festival of Literature and The Poetry Project’s gathering last fall, including one by Hannah Black, who writes against “the smug syntax of professional havers of opinions” that comprises so much of our contemporary discourse in English. Forest Smotrich-Barr interviews Noa Micaela Fields on her new collection, E, while Karim Kazemi talks with Ellen Burstyn about her lifelong love of poetry, culminating in a new release of anthology-meets-memoir called Poetry Says it Better. The featured poems—by Chris Campanioni, Barbara Henning, Miles Johnson, Alex Press, Hayley Stahl, and Journey Streams—cover a range of rhythms and aesthetic approaches that jointly speak to what poetry is, has been, and can still become.
“Anonymity is a condition of collectivity,” writes David Babikian in his review of Nazareth Hassan’s Slow Mania. Anonymity can mean freedom, but it can also mean erasure, a disappearance from knowing. With this issue, and afterwards, again and again: let’s choose to know each other.
