EDITOR’S LETTER

MockingHeart Friends! Welcome back.

Summer is practically here, and with it, our new Spring/Summer issue! We’re so glad to share these excellent works with you as the outside heats up. Here in Louisiana, poetry and artwork are a welcome distraction from the shimmering of air down every road, and the inexorable looming of hurricane season. In other words, things are afoot here in the Boot, as we call the state–and activity also abounds in this issue’s stellar work.

Even though our Spring/Summer issues have no dedicated theme, as it seems to do, the work herein has gathered around certain unifying ideas. Readers can detect in numerous pieces the spectral persistence of our connectedness–to one another, to animals besides ourselves, to the world writ large In many works of art, one might identify this sort of interplay. In “Mark,” Featured Poet Brian Daldorph confides how closeness and distance can be inextricably tethered, writing, “My heart is breaking and / I’d thought it was already broken and couldn’t break anymore.” In the collage “Red Shoes and Happiness,” artist Martha Garner addresses the connection of the chase, as one metaphorized figure follows another. And the poet Christina Hauck discusses unexpected similarities in the poem “Mice,” pondering, “Can it be that I am / as mysterious to him / as this mouse to me?” The work herein urges us to consider that connection is universal, but also that it appears to the interpreter in vastly different, and telling, ways.

As ever, I hope you relish the work in this issue! Thanks for reading, for submitting, and for being a part of the MockingHeart community. Things wouldn’t be the same without you. And thanks, dear friends, for your excellent work in the world.

Tyler Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief