Lyrical Desires for a New Decade: Poetry as Future Continuous
Deadline: April 1, 2020
In her 2011 poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” Tracy K. Smith ponders that: “We saw to the edge of all there is— So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” As we embark on the beginning of a new decade, what will our world (& those beyond our own) look like? What will we lose and what will gain? How will we write ourselves into existence onto the increasingly virtual pages? What languages will we speak? I think of Aracelis Girmay’s poem “O” in the which in the speaker as: “But listen closely./ It is my mouth wailing redly//into the scene from The Future Knows.” ? What will happen to reality— and our ideas of it? For a special issue for The Acentos Review, guest editor Rosebud Ben-Oni is seeking poems by Latinx writers on Lyrical Desires for a New Decade: Poetry as Future Continuous. Both form and free verse are welcome. Send us your future worlds and dreams, your imagined planets and stars filled with paradoxes and tangles, all the new riddles and puzzles and well-worn keys that turn but one lock (or more). Deadline: April 1st for publication in August 2020.
Guest editor, Rosebud Ben-Oni:
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She recently edited a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org