Introducing: The Winter Poems

The Winter Poems

Dear Epiphany Readers,

Thank you for visiting the online poetry showcase of the latest issue of Epiphany. I lovingly call this series The Winter Poems:

• Asa Drake, “Tonight, A Woman” and “I Don’t Know How to Talk About Racism, so I Call My Mother about the Indispensable Pleasure of Material Things”

• Lauren Camp, “Goodbye to Aggressions and Generous Gestures”

• Tuhin Das, “Exile Poems”

• Charlotte O'Brien, “Gaze”

What these poems have in common is their inability to make you comfortable. They will take your heart and leap unapologetically into truth. Follow Asa Drake into “one room / safer than the rest.” Or visit the longing Lauren Camp describes: “With vanishing, / he has removed each pronoun of home.”

Tuhin Das asks that you witness the toll of exile, both physical and emotional: “I bear the suffering of people like the seasons.” Charlotte O’Brien leads us through the grit of a new love: “curtains split / to comfort / life / without a hole inside it. / It must’ve been spring.”

I say this if only so you can prepare: you will not come away unchanged. I certainly haven’t.

I hope you admire these poems as much as I do. And if you do, I hope you pass them along.

Thank you for reading,

Ruth Awad
Guest Poetry Editor, Fall/Winter 2019 issue