Cetera Poetry #1 – The Things That Survive Us
Every poem in this issue arrives carrying its own weather. Some carry the hush of a kitchen after midnight, or the shape of a shoreline where the water keeps its counsel. Some move through childhood terrain half-remembered and half-invented, through fields that no longer exist except in the body. Others speak from distances measured in dialect, in train rides, in inherited silences, in constellations traced by hands that no longer reach toward the sky.
Together, these poems inhabit the territory suggested by our title — The Things That Survive Us. The collection gathers voices from across geographies and sensibilities, each offering a distinct measure of time: personal, ancestral, ecological, linguistic. One poem surveys a life through metes and bounds, mapping intimacy across a changing landscape. Another traces lineage through language and migration, where architecture becomes memory’s scaffolding. Elsewhere, domestic rituals blur into sacrament; waves promise impossible escape; a porch holds both presence and absence in the space of a single rocking chair.
The poets in this issue write toward what persists in grief, in love, in silence, in the body’s recall. Their work holds open a space where inheritance may wound and sustain in equal measure, where absence acquires weight. And perhaps most importantly, where survival itself becomes a form of translation.
This inaugural poetry issue would not exist without the generosity and trust of its contributors, who placed their work into our care with patience and conviction. We extend our gratitude to each poet whose voice appears here.
Our thanks also belong to the editors who shaped this gathering with attentiveness and clarity, and to the readers whose quiet labor helped bring these poems into conversation with one another.
The issue is now available to download here:
The Poets
Colin Punt. Linlang Zhao. MF Charles. Harper Obstfeld. Ro Novak. Micke van Zyl. Kenneth Pobo. Erin Jamieson. Ben Macnair. Paul Hostovsky.
The Editors
Jon Negroni. Natalia Emmons.
