EDITOR’S LETTER

MockingHeart friends! Welcome to the new year. I hope it’s been treating you well. Louisiana is normally a place replete with warmth, the hum of insects and the trills of birds, and–like I mentioned a few issues ago, that one guy on the motorcycle who keeps on cruising up and down the street. So imagine my surprise when the massive winter storm that swept the United States stretched its icy fingers into Baton Rouge. After my wife and I covered all the plants in the backyard and somehow coaxed our rambunctious tortoiseshell cat into the house, we found ourselves hustling indoors to brew coffee, wrap up in blankets, and crack open books. Reclusiveness became the order of the day, and so it remains even as I write this letter, and as the nights dip into territory we might call “vexingly chilly.”

Our new edition is here, and for this issue, poets and artists contemplated reclusiveness too–the preference for solitude, the withdrawal from society, the very wintery impulse to be insular. An urge that we can all at times relate to. Our Featured Poet, Betty Stanton, meditates on darker facets of this theme in “Brothers in Winter,” in which one sibling confronts a threatening bear, and “two brothers answer each other / across miles and miles of winter.” Artist Michael C. Roberts spends time in solitude through nature’s layered and stark beauty in the photograph Solitary Saguaro in black and white, Sonoran Desert. In “Genesis 3:19,” poet Jessica Siobhan Frank reflects on a single soul, “a bright wild Cosmos with one bloom / and so many more on the brink.” Insularity comes to the fore for artist Vincenzo Cohen in the haunting painting The Abandon. And poet Sekyo Nam Haines considers the rare moments of insight into our past selves, locked away from the world as they are, “a birdlike silhouette / in the air.” All of these pieces, and the others throughout this issue, give space to the isolation we create for ourselves, and they’re deeply worthy of observation here.

Good luck in this unfolding year, my friends. It’s a privilege to join you here at the start of MockingHeart Review‘s eleventh volume–here’s to this new literary decade to come. And thank you, as always, for your excellent work in the world.

Tyler Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief