Reading the submissions for Propel Magazine has been an honour, and it’s also been one of my hardest tasks of the year. The difficulty I found in whittling hundreds of poems down to twenty speaks of the brilliance of the poetry being written right now in the UK and Ireland. I was excited to see the form in constant, thrilling flux through these submissions —  writers finding new possibilities for what poetry might be and become. 

It put me in mind of the advice to aspiring writers given by the endlessly inventive American poet Bernadette Mayer, who died in 2022 — ‘Work your ass off to change the language and don’t ever get famous.’ I can’t say if the poets in this issue will take the latter part of Mayer’s advice, but they are clearly taking the former. Poetry is as alive, as relevant, as mercurial and as necessary as it has ever been, as the following pages clearly demonstrate. 

In the submissions for this issue, it was fascinating to see the ways in which poets are confronting their heritage, ancestry and culture(s). Many are interrogating the porous boundaries of identity — be that between different tongues, spaces, homes or selves. These poems demonstrate how much Anglophone poetry is enriched and made fuller by the influence of languages not its own, and by the flow and conversation between them. 

Another thing that these submissions made strikingly clear was that ‘Nature poetry,’ which for a some years seemed a little fusty and out of date, has come roaring back. Poets are attending carefully to the material world around them, as well as to the weight of environmental collapse and the climate crisis. ‘Nature poetry’ as was has really transformed into ‘environmental poetry,’ work that explores the threads that bind us to the living world, that draw our attention to our embeddedness within it. 

These are poems that face the world as it is now, but which also carve out ways to change it. Thank you for reading.

— Rebecca Tamás
January 2023