Dear Oyster River Pages Family & Friends,
It has been a pleasure to be your 2021 Poetry Intern here at ORP. Our Senior Poetry Editor, Dr. Abigail Michelini, and I have had an amazing time reading and discussing your work over the last year, but especially for this James Baldwin-inspired issue. We received 140 submissions in poetry alone in about a two-month submission window, and we were truly blown away by the quality of submissions we were lucky enough to receive, especially on such short notice. Thank you for continuing your support of this free literary magazine that will continue to prioritize and center marginalized voices.
I’ve been editing poetry for a little over ten years now, and as cliché as it is, I look for poems with a certain “x” factor, that ineffable feeling that follows me after reading a good poem. In hopefully less pretentious terms (ha), I look for poems that surprise me. But, as we made our final selections, I was surprised by the overarching theme of triumph in the poems we selected. I think this speaks to Baldwin’s emphasis on our need as humans to experience that “force of life” in order to keep going through difficulty and trials. This intrinsic need to “rejoice” seems especially true given that we are entering the third year of an international pandemic. Thank you to all the poets who helped nourish us this winter through their good work.
Until we can break bread in person,
Micah J. Ruelle, 2021 Poetry Intern
(She/They)
