Dear Reader,
When I first began my graduate studies, my mentor, the poet and essayist Lia Purpura, counseled me to “keep the seedling-love for the word alive.” Her advice has been on my mind a great deal lately as I come to the end of my doctoral program and look out into a world in which love for the word—language and its power, its beauty, its difficulty, its demand—seems increasingly under siege. Rather than loved, I see the word twisted and wielded to do grave harm to things I hold dear, scraped and transformed into something inhuman, or set aside in favor of choosing something easier. To carefully, deliberately tend to the seedling-love for the word, and to love it well amidst the myriad distractions and pressures of life, can be a hard choice to make.
So it comes as little surprise to me that, now more than ever, I choose to search for and tend to this seedling-love in community with others. I find it when reading The Beautiful and Damned with my undergraduates and helping them articulate their frustrations with Anthony and Gloria Patch. I find it while reveling in the agony and awe and abject confusion of my close friend reading Ulysses for the first time because I wouldn’t stop talking about it. I find it in online groups of writers and readers who come together because they want to connect over their shared reverence for all that the word can be. I even find it when reading “Curious George and the Dump Truck” with my toddler for what feels like (and certainly must be) the thousandth time because something in the story makes him want to hear it over and over again.
And I find the seedling-love for the word in you, dear reader, and in sharing this issue of Literary Matters with you, a labor with which I am both honored and humbled to be entrusted. There is much this issue has to offer: old and new, familiar and strange, unsettling and delightful. The pieces have all, in some way or another, prompted me to consider afresh the way I think about the world, be it the experience of drowning, or the haiku form, or a familiar short story, to gesture to but a few of the many exquisite moments in this issue. I am so deeply grateful to our contributors; this issue would not be possible without you and your willingness to share your writing with this community.
I am also incredibly grateful to the community of editors who have helped Literary Matters become the journal it is today. This has been a year of change for Literary Matters, and I have the bittersweet task of both saying farewell to a number of editors as well as welcoming a few new faces. First, I would like to recognize and thank Matthew Steinhafel, Matthew Buckley Smith, Caitlin Doyle, Chris Childers, Alexis Sears, and Ryan Wilson for all of their work on Literary Matters over the years. While these editors have since moved on to different projects, the journal would not exist as it does, nor reach as many readers as it has, without their efforts, and I am grateful to continue the work they’ve begun.
To that end, I would like to introduce some changes to the Literary Matters’ masthead. Cameron Clark, a contributing editor with the journal since 2023 has taken on the mantle of Poetry Editor; Elijah Perseus Blumov has joined the journal as Translation Editor; and Ethan McGuire has come on board as a contributing editor with the column Images and Words: On the Power of Movies as Popular Poetry that focuses on the intersection of film and poetry. I am thankful for them, and for our Production Editor, Jeff Peters, for all their efforts to bring this new issue of the journal to life.
There is a clear desire for what Literary Matters has to offer to a community of readers like the one that the editors, past and present, have so carefully cultivated. In 2025, the website had an increase of 183,411 unique individuals and of 335,824 different pages read, and this growth in readership is directly connected to a 233% increase in visibility on Google. I hope to see the journal’s readership continue to grow over the course of my tenure as Editor-in-Chief, of course, but what I hope most in this moment is that you find something in this new issue—a poem, an essay, a translation—that speaks to the seedling-love for the word that lives inside of you, and helps you tend to it within this singular community of writers, readers, and critics.
Emily Grace