Dear reader,
Welcome to Issue 112 of The Rupture!
I'm happy to be serving as Guest Editor for the month of April, and am excited to share for this issue—a quintessential spring—the sharp-eyed, robust work of Ching-In Chen, Cassie Mira, JD Pluecker, Monica Rico, Aliah Lavonne Tigh, and Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal. True to the season, the issue pulses with ardent searching, re-making of self, or undoing, letting go of what can't be held together, and bringing together what remains whole.
From the meditative, breath-seeking multi-voiced poems of Chen, to the tender and grief-laden intimacy of Rico and Tigh's work, these writers' poems cut through readerly expectation with surprise and daring, using the language of origami techniques to reveal the rich interiority of a trans woman's re-making of body and self (Mira), the use of ekphrasis to examine Latinidad artists and their art and interweaving the language of art catalogue with social activist, bilingual commentary (Villarreal), or the form-irreverent, collage poem (Pluecker) that considers how "to turn back // come back // insist" on the undoing of colonialism's violence. Yes, it's a full issue, and I hope you find as much to think about as you read it as I have, and hope, especially, that it leads you to check out the work of these poets—and find an abundance of thought and dialogue between them.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Guest Poetry Editor