This is such a good issue,” I said to Leslie when I handed the files over to her for final edits, layout, and other managing-editor meticulousness. And I said it again when Eli, our office manager, was getting ready to print it out to take home for the weekend. I’d just been through each piece, going back and forth with the authors with questions and edits, and I’d come to a deeper appreciation for their commitment and vision for every phrase and detail. I was thinking of the conversations I’d had with translator Slava Faybysh about the awkward vocabulary around the female body, and with poet Gail McConnell about the plural form of “kelp.” I was thinking of the final breathless passage of Joan Leegant’s story, and of the spaciousness of Peter Gizzi’s poem. And I was still feeling the cold of the Irish sea, and the heat of the J & S Shell station in South L.A., and worrying along with Efrén Ordoñez Garza about the difference between a Writer and a writer. “It’s really a good issue,” I said again, and Leslie had to laugh. “We always say that!” she said.

We do always say that, earnestly and as if it’s a surprise, but this time I can point to the particular excitement around bringing out our annual international feature, in this case “‘The Door Left Wide’: Irish Poets in Tribute to Eavan Boland.” Shara Lessley presented the idea for this supplement after her longtime mentor, the fierce and beloved Irish poet Eavan Boland, died in 2020. Grief led to action, as she issued calls for submissions online and in Ireland’s literary networks—Poetry Ireland, Poetry Critics of Colour in Ireland, the Seamus Heaney Poetry Center, the Munster Literature Centre, and Ó Bhéal, to name a few. She worked with authors on some fine-tuning and ordered the poems precisely. As the work came in over the course of more than a year, each piece stood alone, a single writer’s project in recognition of their lineage with Eavan Boland. But now that the poems are together, readers will be able to see each one as part of a whole, possibly noting what these writers have in common and what the poetry of Boland might have motivated and freed them to pursue. I was struck not just by their individual language and the emergence of certain themes but by what should have been obvious: Ireland is an island. It’s surrounded by the cold Atlantic, the Irish and Celtic Seas, and the North Channel. Whether in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, one is never more than eighty miles from saltwater. Bioregion plays a part in these poems, but they also can’t help but converse with the proud, and even popular, tradition of literature in Ireland. Prior to the euro, the Republic of Ireland featured W. B. Yeats on its 20-pound banknote and James Joyce on the 10-pound (though no women writers). And just as Boland’s influence extends far beyond her native land, the literary contributions for which she is best known—her honest account of women’s existence, her attention to everydayness, her reckonings with power and marginalization—can be seen woven into the pieces on both sides of this special feature and in the magazine as a whole.

Part of our excitement in presenting an international feature also comes from the culmination of a long list of tasks—those generally uncelebrated but essential, everyday details that our readers never see. Which brings me back to Eli, Elizabeth Sutton, our office manager for the past six years. She too has come to feel the anticipation around our international supplements, even though to her that means many more contracts and more international tax IDs, more bio notes, bank forms, and invoices. While we were assembling “The Door Left Wide,” and Eli was ticking the boxes to make sure everyone would get paid, she also decided to brush up on Irish history by reading Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves. A self-professed “recovering English major from Bennington,” Eli came to NER not just because she was confident with Excel and databases and the inner workings of publishing from her background at Columbia University Press, AMS, and Ashgate, as well as her time as a bookseller, but because she could apply all that to something that would be more than just a series of tasks. Somewhere she could offer her valued opinions about cover art, commission bookmark designs, and contribute to the success of events, not just by bringing the books but by being an attentive audience member. This is what has made her time at NER more satisfying to her but also to the rest of us. Eli has decided to retire this summer, and we’ll miss her terribly: her relentless curiosity, humility, intelligence, and sense of humor. We’ll especially miss hearing Eli laughing together with nearly everyone she encounters, including exhausted postal bureaucrats, the people who come to collect the trash, and warehouse clerks tracking lost packages. Though she’s going to set aside NER’s spreadsheets and contracts, she’ll continue as a reader of submissions, and, having been the person assigning and tracking reader assignments for years now, I’m sure she’ll be among the most conscientious as she flags the manuscripts that most capture her lively imagination.

I expect that when Eli brings the pages back to Leslie she’ll point out any missing or repeated prepositions (hopefully none), but she’ll also have something to say about the writing itself. And I very much hope that she’ll join us in saying, “This is such a good issue.”

In honor of Eavan Boland, and with immense gratitude to Shara Lessley, we dedicate this issue to all the people who do the necessary and unsung labor that makes literary publication possible, especially our own Eli Sutton.

—CK

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