In keeping with the theme of “Collaborations,” for this issue we bring you an editors’ note written collaboratively, with each of our genre and guest editors highlighting (a small sample of!) what they loved about this issue.
Our guest poetry editors, Todd Fredson and Octavio Quintanilla, along with staff poetry editor, Marcela Sulak, selected an array of collaborative forms, beginning with Denise Duhamel and Aaron Smith’s co-authored abecedarian prose poem, “The Indigo Girls,” from a larger project about celebrity culture. Other collaborations include found poems, centos, golden shovels, paratext, and translation from Kurdish, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Ukraine, Hebrew, and German. Todd found himself drawn to the brink of mystery and to the surreal imagery of Cameroonian Josiane Kouagheu’s poems, which are grounded in an insistent social realism and do not separate the personal from the political. In them, the individual and collective cannot help but collaborate, creating a feeling that sticks, and you can’t get away from it. No matter where you push your mind, that feeling will recreate itself.
Our creative nonfiction guest editor Sherre Vernon and staff editor Jane Medved note: “What we loved about our three CNF selections was the varied models of collaboration they explored. ‘Conditional Light’ considers what we bring and what we take as we enter physical spaces, while ‘Transcript with Unknown Participants’ tracks the disconcerting relationship between writer and artificial intelligence. Our last selection, ‘In My Father’s Office,’ puts us firmly back in the messy world of human relationships where collaboration is forced rather than given.
Guest fiction editor Jeff Friedman spotlights Dzvinia Orlowsky’s “The Unknown Beatle,” “a poignantly comic coming-of-age story, a beautifully imagined memory of the purity and despair of striving to achieve something beyond one’s reach.” On Celia Bland’s “The Fault”, staff editor Nadia Jacobson writes: “I loved how a Frost poem inspired this moving story of a daughter’s relationship with her mother. How the mother’s ring, which the daughter at first rejects, is imbued with her mother’s essence and seems to represent the flawed beauty of their connection.” Taylor Johnston-Levy adores how “Namesake” by Frances Gapper and Meg Pokrass “keeps turning itself inside out, revealing a newly psychedelic and hilarious combination of a nostalgic goldfish, French art history, and a generic yet depressed yet endearing Jane – a feat perhaps only the layering of two minds could produce. In the mayhem, fish flakes give way to ‘a sprinkle of caviar,’ chin hairs to purple potato flowers, avant-garde icons to idolatry.” Karen Marron loves the surprise in every line of Nasreen Tamaa Zankawah’s “Lost Umbrella,” with sentences like “[her lover] smiled at her for no reason, picked up her call when she was arrested for cutting the arm of her stalker with a knife, remembered her birthdays…”
Finally, we are proud to feature the work of the Kopilka Project, a miniature “Republic of Letters”: a collective of translators and poets who find intellectual and spiritual citizenship based on both individual creativity and joyful collaboration as they create a “safe archive for Russophone poetry of witness” following Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
—Marcela Sulak and the editors of The Ilanot Review
October, 2026