Introduction and Table of Contents

	Corey Van Landingham    American Four Square    Blood Moon    A Certain Epicharis    The End of the Life of Giorgione Da Castelfranco,      Venetian Painter    Hypotactic Rebecca Poynor    Review | Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens by      Corey Van Landingham A Correspondence with Corey Van Landingham    Conducted by Waverley Vesely
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Rebecca Poynor writes in her review of Corey Van Landingham’s most recent book of poems, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens: “Van Landingham’s speaker joins art and history in their state of mechanical being—sentient and human but trapped within modern machinations and technology.” Van Landingham’s poem “The Marriage Plot” is featured in v21n2. Her first book, Antidote, won The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry in 2012. Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens was published by Tupelo Press in 2022 and Van Landingham’s new book, Reader, I, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2024.

Van Landingham’s work often confronts the violence and distance that often exists in aesthetics, as well as daily life. In “American Four Square,” she writes:

Sometimes
even beauty needs a border.

Only in plowless tracts along the rail cut
does the wild iris cast, still,

its explicit spell. Yes, we believed
in this mythos. We lived between Church

and University, could almost imagine no one
had died there.

Contemplative and engaged with an understanding of the way stories make their way into the speaker’s world, these poems often delve into questions of language and meaning that attend to the heart of what makes humanity what it is.

We invite you to enjoy her work in this issue and encourage you to read her other projects.