In this process of re-reading and discernment, I asked myself: what poems illuminate the brutality of this political moment? What disruptions can a poem create, while remaining within the unsolvability of it all? It is an essential time to consider the meaning of words, when we are told words are meaningless. When we demand an end to occupation or ceasefire, we are told those words do not instigate action. Amidst the incalculable loss of genocidal violence and the transphobia plaguing public consciousness, poets like Yousef Alawi, Regina Avendaño and Jory Garner reclaim the meaning of words, insisting on the sacrality of all life. Poems that urgently tug at our spinal columns and our interconnected dignity. Refusing the dehumanisation we are witnessing, Garner asks: ‘I wonder if I'm something you could love.’ 

Whoever claims the ‘I’ in these poems is also you and me. A powerful poem will trouble our sense of separateness, trick the boundaries of flesh, and command us to touch the sharedness of our experience. Grief is a connective tissue, as Christina Sharpe describes it: ‘a conduit for relation.’ The ‘I’ serves as a doorway—to wander into a not-yet-encountered self, or into the mad worlds that live on either side of a skin. We are rather attached to the idea of who we think we are. Poetry is one way to relieve us from this exhausting project of self, to rest the tyrannies of ego, and to find ourselves in the body of another. 

Body. That bone-deep, cell-fizzing place from which the poem departs and arrives. As a psychologist, I'm particularly attuned to the ways we deny ourselves of feeling. I was therefore drawn to poems that ask questions of the full-feeling body, investigating its porous contradictions. Sensation and numbness. Refusal and containment. 

Poems, here, help us bear the seemingly unbearable. Revelling in error, errancy, and bottomless desire. Divinely (un)bearable wanting is captured in J.J. Carey’s line ‘I wanted you more than dignity.’ We want and want and fail each other. Disappointment and grief are tucked into the belly of any attempted love. These queerer poetics are unafraid to dwell in death, failure, and the unresolvable mess of togetherness. These are poems that don’t close a thought so much as open it further. They make room—for doubt, for contradiction, for the slow work of (entangled) feeling. 

Time spent on this issue has reignited Audre Lorde’s wisdom: ‘There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt.’ Language here moves in surprising and unexpected ways. It tricks and travels waywardly—backflipping through back-alleys of the body, cartwheeling into the aorta. These poets are calling you to pay attention to y/our one life. On its quiet insistence that, even in rupture, something bewildering begins again. 

— Sanah Ahsan
May 2025