Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Though I cannot say with any certainty whether it reflects the taste of the editor or merely the leanings of the submissions pool, the lines of most of the poems in Issue 1 of Sweet seem unusually long for contemporary poetry, with the obvious exception of Carol Berg’s Eighth Grade Social Studies Class which, as a prose poem, uses the paragraph instead of line and verse. The form is appropriate for her subject, for the way one thing quickly leads to another. The lack of punctuation and repetition of ‘and’ helps capture a young teen’s voice, but the ending “lets all our throats go” hardly seems earned. Perhaps if there were more build-up or more awareness of everyone watching, it would work better.

From another angle, however, a prose poem of one paragraph consists of a single line, which leaves Stephen Kuusisto’s Autobiographia Litteraria as the only clear-cut exception. Unfortunately, some of his shortest lines fail to carry enough weight to justify the line breaks: “They knew”, “Hoping”.

The longest lines occur in Brian Baumgart’s What Happened on the Nine O’Clock News with each sentence receiving its own line. Because these sentences are musically unremarkable and the individual events they express are uninteresting, I didn’t want to like this poem. I probably would have rejected it if I were reading it in my capacity as editor. I would have been wrong to do so. The lack of music underscores the way quotidian events and possibilities build up into a sense of a life and the world in which one lives it, even if that sense is flawed as the last line suggests it may be. The doubts raised in the last line make even rereading this poem worthwhile.

My favorite of the issue, however, has to be Luisa A. Igloria’s Yo Yu. Her images flow from line to line, surreal and visceral at once. In some instances, a well-placed vagueness makes the world strange:

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At other times, it is details that make the scene: not machines but “[l]awnmowers and cars” float by. This world overturned was suburban.

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