Most nights after dinner, I walk the four blocks to our local elementary school. It’s where I take my kids in the morning, but at night the playground is empty of children. The tower of the jungle gym rises into the dark like a skeletal steeple. There is a kidney-shaped dog park flanking the tennis courts, where mutts and purebreds dart in all directions, panting and barking, as a tennis ball plucks out the flattest melody from one side of the court to the other. I note the scene, more boisterous than I’d like for a night walk, and cross the dirt track that circles all and make my way to the baseball field. I don’t like baseball, but I like open space and I like to walk into the shadows just beyond first base, where I stand in the dark and look up.

Sometimes the sky is overcast, still dusk, still rose-hued from the sun, which sets late in Austin, Texas, where I live. A friend tells me that color, a burnt radiance, is actually the haze of pollutants, Saharan dust from Africa. Sometimes, it is dark enough to see starlight and, best of all, the light from downtown. Light, as another friend tells me, was an especially troubling air pollutant in the nineteenth century, forever changing how we experience darkness. But the light of this skyline is its own starry night: skyscrapers form a constellation of heights, ranging from taller to tallest, flecked with red, green, and blue, a lovely, offbeat pattern in the night. The first time I walked here I had not realized the schoolyard was perched on a hill, and in the dark, from the corner of my eye, a cluster of sparks startled me: there was our city floating over some trees. I was discovering what I had somehow failed to expect, and it felt as if I were the one lighting up in the dark. 

It is a new year, and my night walks are one way I measure time. NER is another. Both thrive on repetition, and yet both welcome variations. You might even say it’s the variation that drives one to keep repeating. Recently, I walked to the field and found squatting over the city lights a comically rotund orange moon. I still remember how turning my head just slightly towards the tennis courts I caught its round edge, the color strange and discordant beside the usual scene. I stood mouth agape, ready to swallow the moon whole, and then, after some time passed, I ran home to show my children in the backyard, catching them right before lights out. How is NER any different? In the course of our duties, we are often and suddenly struck dumb by something we never expected to encounter, and yes, we want to swallow it whole. Or at least I do. (Reading, after all, is one way we try to digest the outside world, to take someone else’s experience into our bodies.) This issue, which marks a new year, is testament to our collective astonishment, as every issue is.

It is a new year, and so I want to lean into wonder because our habits—reading poems, taking walks—might be daily and sometimes dull, but they also animate our lives. I use the word “animate” with an intentional nod to etymology: “anima” is the Greek word for soul. I don’t know what the soul is, exactly, but I think there can sometimes be a vividness to living, a vigor akin to wonder, that makes one feel more alive. Like a good walk, a good poem reminds me that I don’t know everything. A good poem reroutes the synapses, adds a new tune to my emotional repertoire, and lets me know that poetry is even better than I thought and that I better keep reading. Who knew a moon could look so silly and still be so gorgeous? 

Good poems abound in this issue. Gobsmackingly good poems. (I know the prose is superb, too, but I’ll be the first to admit to a genre bias.) As NER’s poetry editor, I lead a team of readers, who each on the regular shows me a new path to wonder. They are as adventurous as they are discerning, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that every issue that goes out warrants a celebration of their industry and their brilliance. Huzzah! I’d take a walk with any of them. What else do walks and poems have in common? They can be equally pleasurable in solitude and in company. And this is equally true, too, for writers and readers: here we are again, alone and together, wandering into another new year. 

—Jennifer Chang, poetry editor

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