Recenter Press Poetry Journal: Issue Five
New issue is out!
Hi all, I am thrilled to share that Issue Five of the Recenter Press Poetry Journal is out this week. You can read and share the latest issue here.
As I was curating this issue, I was especially drawn to poems and visual art around home-ship and housing, relationships with family, and death / mortality / grief / the existential. These works are touching and beautiful, coming from a range of styles and voices, from creators in the Bay Area and Philadelphia and different corners of the world.
Of course, the curation practice — so much more dynamic than “acceptance vs. rejection” — is an art of wholly subjective personal taste, and also experience and much time spent with a medium. It reflects both the craft and skill of makers’ work, and the curator’s too. There is the assessment and the judgment and the careful, critical attention to perspective / narrative / historical framework. But there is also the resonance, the mystery, the selections based on something moving within us, the inner nudging towards and not away, in context with what is happening in the world.
I like that my creative practice can take different shapes. Sometimes, this is in curation and outreach to writers I support, and hearing from writers I haven’t heard of yet. Sometimes, this is in organizing author events, selecting local authors’ books to carry in the bookstores I manage, or reviewing books I’ve finished reading. Sometimes this is in my own writing practice, dance practice, photo practice, what-I-want-to-wear practice, conversation / sharing / listening practice. One of the central joys and responsibilities of creative practice, I think, is in using whatever platforms we have to support and amplify others’ creative work, to build each other up in whatever avenues we have available to us. Being a creative channel / vessel is a happening through our own voices, and through sharing others’ voices, which can look so so so so so many different ways.
I hope that you enjoy this issue and that you feel free to share your feedback with me, and with the writers here too. I am so grateful to all of you who submitted your pieces, entrusted me with your work, and who read and support the work I share through Recenter Press. I hope that I can continue to share the work I love through the outlets that I am given and that I work so incommunicably hard to build up, truly. Thank you all for reading, and for being here — some of you for years and some totally brand new.
“I have been loved in this house more than I have ever been loved.
I have loved this house more than anything I have ever loved.”