Finally I set a final deadline and I’ve been hell-bent to keep it. Over a year has passed since Annulet’s previous issue, and much of the work that appears in this one has been unfairly waiting since late 2024 for publication. I have made my apologies to the authors, given context for how and why 2025 slid by, even as I was uneasy with such personal disclosure. But the encompassing kindness and wisdom that I received in response from these contributors has utterly moved me. Things in the literary world, even in the interpersonal corner of poetry community that I inhabit, still carry that sheen of professional gloss which can at times be a necessary social buffer and others, a seemingly indifferent or impenetrable surface. (We’re not immune to hustle culture, nor are we each other’s therapeutic proxies.) Over these last few days preparing what’s become this double issue, I’ve been reminded that currents of loss and suffering interknit us all, and luckily for me, I happened to be writing to some of the most emotionally and intellectually attuned minds I could have hoped to reach: poets, writers, people who write about poetry and writing. I am profoundly grateful for the graciousness these authors have shown and shared with me, not least in allowing me to publish their work after such delay. The exchange of experience, fundamentally, is the living nerve of human-centered writing, our interior workings put forward in written form. So, I begin this note for Issue (9) and (10) from the same deep-seated emotional vantage from which I wrote to these sixty-eight contributors, and I make my apology to readers and supporters of Annulet in kind. Only what amounted to an unrepeatable confluence of life events made it such that I absented from this project that’s so dear to me, and I hope to never cast doubt on Annulet’s continued publication again. A year without Annulet felt eerily quiet.

Even as I contended with a daily sense of obligation to just put the issue together, I remember thinking, as 2024 came to a close and we passed the year-mark of the genocide in Gaza and then the second and still it goes on, about that fundamental dissonance of  “business as usual” and the larger narrative we know has been forcefully managed in an attempt to naturalize that which is most hideously unnatural and inhuman. I felt then, and continue to feel, real hesitation to move as though there’s any normalcy at all. Part of me thought, as I was unable to do this editorial work for personal reasons, if I might also consider holding back on Annulet (a small-scale protest if ever there was one) as my long-term strategy to publicly (poetry publicly, for what or everything that’s worth) register this uncertainty. Part of me is also not unhappy with the outcome in that sense, a missing year in the publication record. It is, as I hear it said and say it myself, a weird time to be doing anything. An understatement. Especially as the oligarchic class’s multifront, discordant siege is brought to bear in Minneapolis, in Memphis, in data and detention centers and camps (how aware I am of encoding these searchable tags, terms, chiasmus regardless) keeps escalating, meeting resistance, forming and deforming, murdering and failing, that dissonance becomes newly immediate and acute as we exist in this state of saturated crisis and corruption. Dislocation of attention and action, bone out of socket, mind out of mind. Having a conscience is a necessarily open wound. To stay sensitized in the face of it. It is only in solidarity that action and attention inhere.

In moving forward with this double issue, I do so in alignment with other cultural and knowledge workers who continue to operate in kind: artistic and critical expressions are essential to both individual and broader processing of experience, of history as it happens, of political reality. Incentives to outsource and flatten this work only underscore its inimitable function. Even as I believe that the work of an online literary journal will increasingly be to protect the writing it publishes, I would not want to unintentionally fulfill the larger goal of demoralized silence that looms over us by holding back the work of this double issue any longer. What this issue’s long-awaited folio, “American Poetry and Poetics, 2008–2025,” shows, is that particularly poetry from our ongoing “post-crisis” period, as Brian Ang formulates it, has been, for all its theorization, difficulty, and different projects, a site for the ongoing processing of progressive political thinking and artistic experiment in text. It is no surprise that the most politically inclined poets and critics are ready to historicize, even as it can be a real and vulnerable, personal thing to, as Laura Jaramillo and Ryan Eckes’ essay shows. Layli Long Soldier, Divya Victor, Tommy Pico, Cathy Park Hong, Brian Teare, and Chelsey Minnis, according to this iteration of the folio, are but some of the figures whose work is exemplary of what’s happened in poetry between the financial crash of 2008 and the polycrisis (as Adam Tooze has popularized the term) of 2025. Marjorie Perloff, like it or not, makes appearances in Toby Altman and Kai Ihns’ essays that each contend with a relitigated and repurposed avant-garde (though no one wants to poke the bear of the Poetry Wars, there’s no doubt many poets have grown up in that shadow). Essays that feature the Bay Area (Brian Ang) and Western Massachusetts (Ian Fishman) frame the ongoing coastal question; work on visual and material poetics from Anna James (the long poem) and Carlina Duan (the artists’ book) threads the ever-increasingly multidisciplinary line of this, our contemporary moment. Though it nearly goes without saying, a folio cannot itself be a definitive statement for an entire twenty-three year period, which, if I may, has witnessed what can only be described as a flowering of poetry produced in the U.S.—never before has there been more opportunity and community available for the fostering of it. I, for one, don’t take that for granted. Further: no folio on this period could pass muster without featuring Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), and while there is not an essay on it as of its publication today, it is my hope to be able to include one about it that’s in the works soon. As such, “American Poetry and Poetics, 2008–2025” will remain open as a distinct category of essay for which both continued submissions or queries are encouraged. There is plenty yet still to cover. And there are many other essays in Issue (9) and (10)—double the issue, double the fun—that constellate everything from Elizabeth Robinson’s moving homage to Keith Waldrop to a translation of a poetics essay by the little-known Viennese avant-gardist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), translated by Bradley Harmon. 

This might well be Annulet’s rangiest and most poetically ambitious gathering of new work yet. No one writes poems like Talin Tahajian’s vatic outcries except perhaps King Solomon himself or maybe Eugene Ostashevsky. An entire masthead of a new literary journal appears independently in this double issue (Samira Abed, Hannah Piette, Scout Katherine Turkel). Brian Blanchfield and Rose McLarney’s stanzaic meditations unfold in syntax both chiseled and supple. Many of the poems presented here have moved into published book form as 2025 passed by, including scintillating new and selected work from Emily Wilson, Tracy Zeman, Ron Padgett, Sarah Riggs, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Ordinarily I offer my gratitude to the presses (Coffee House, University of Iowa Press, Parlor Press, Winter Editions) who’ve lent this work to Annulet’s project, but in light of my delay, I want to further encourage readers to pursue the books in which these poems now appear. Along these lines, it is a happy treat to be able include an excerpt from the 2024 Linkages Lecturer Zach Savich’s forthcoming book Phonebank (in lieu of a variation of the lectures that now appears in book form, too, both from 53rd State Press), which presents a conversation of a kind with Caryl Pagel, poet, essayist, and editor of Rescue Press, and an ongoing influence on me (and an important many others), in the very best way. Whenever people lament the dearth of poetry reviews, which is often and certainly not untrue, I think about the reviews that appear in Annulet, which are many. No less than nine are included in this double issue alone, covering books published in 2024 (Tess Brown-Lavoie on Laura Henriksen’s Laura’s Desires) to Susan Howe’s singular, moving Penitentiary Cries (2025). Reviews are as evergreen as the day you pick up a book to read it.

The return of Annulet to regular activity will include some new ventures into other forms beyond the literary journal. (I’m conscious, only more so now, of what it means to promise things in public.) One form is the pamphlet series, Annuals, to be published once a year but not necessarily every year, and a podcast, A Circle Is A Sturdy Thing (a line from a poem by Cody-Rose Clevidence), which will feature conversation, interviews, and other considerations from a revolving cast of hosts. These, in addition to the Linkages Lecture Series, the Critical Circle, and the launch of Annulet Editions and regular issue appearance, will constitute my Annulet-centered work for the foreseeable future. While it may be hard to feel, these are all gestures of futurity, which is an implicit acknowledge that there will be one, and that we are working, in our own private and public ways, for it to be better than what has been.


Yours in the work,

Alicia Wright
Editor, Annulet