After days of reading and rereading, I’m feeling somewhat dazed but also incredibly satisfied. Spending time with poetry is one of my greatest pleasures, and what a real joy it was to get a glimpse at so much new work all at once – what a privilege it was to be pulled away from the work I may normally find myself picking up, to break the pattern of my reading, and encounter all these different and often new-to-me poetic modes and ways of making.

I distinctly remember how I felt submitting poetry as a newer writer: excited, exposed, anxious, hopeful, mystified – and vulnerable, too. Always vulnerable. Vulnerability, for me, seems to be the constant variable when it comes to writing and sharing poetry. So, with all of that in mind, I did my best to show care and attention to each of the over 400 submissions for Propel’s fifth issue. Earlier, when I said rereading, I meant it. These submissions came with me to the highlands, to park benches at the botanic gardens, and on many, many train journeys. I shared space with them, ate breakfast with them, and saw that Submittable landing page more than I saw my friends.

The truth is, I did feel a great responsibility while reading these submissions. The cover letters were sometimes a little window into the lives of these writers. Once in a while, they revealed that the submission was their very first submission ever. Maybe I’m projecting again, but what a tender, special thing that is. Other times, they were written intimately, with the writer engaged in dialogue with the submitted poems and a potential audience. Both this context and the poems themselves hinted at the shapes of different lives in different places, all pursuing the wild, equally fulfilling and frustrating act of writing and submitting poetry.

Anyway, all of this is to say I find being a gatekeeper a complicated thing, and though the job is to select only a few from the many, I hope that doors have also been opened: to new voices and strategies, to perspectives that are experimenting with subject and form. To poems that found a home here because they came across my particular gaze, and maybe I saw something, understood something, or felt something that the poet wanted to get across in a magical kind of symbiosis. That’s the other gift of Propel. A new guest editor for each issue is a terrific model; it means that there is always the potential for a writer, for a poem, to find space here, because each editor brings with them a fresh perspective.

In My Trade Is Mystery (a craft book I recommend to all poets) Carl Phillips writes that ‘the poem is the evidence – like tracks, or footprints – of my quest into and across strange territory, the shape I’ve left almost as if unintentionally behind me.’ The twenty poems here are the tracks, the evidence, the shapes left behind, of these twenty writers who have taken risks across these pages:

Here are poems that rupture language and syntax, like Wendelin Law’s ‘I dreamed a turbid dream…’, Karan Chambers’ ‘siren’, and Lucille Mona Ling’s ‘What should we do with our superstitious fathers’;

Here are poems that untangle and defamiliarise poetic structures, like VJ René’s ‘Sonnet (with an untranslated copy of Fragoletta)’, and Sam Rye’s ‘Ancestry’;

Here are poems that are curious and discursive, like Ulyses Razo’s ‘Bee Sleeping Off the Blue Tears’, Caitlin Tina Jones’ ‘Impala’, Zahra Rafiq’s ‘Dreamcatcher,’ and Annina Zheng-Hardy’s ‘Waterlogged’;

Here are poems that are rhythmic and powerfully attuned to the musicality of a line, like Aleja Taddesse’s ‘morning’ and Anjali Ramayya’s ‘Kathak Dancer’;

Here are poems that are ecologically engaged, intertwining physical and emotional landscapes, like Emily Alice Spivey’s ‘Canal,’ David Nash’s ‘Turlough’, Charlotte Baldwin’s ‘Bucolic Acid,’ and Shakeema Edwards’ ‘Topsoil’;

Here are poems that are reflective and relational, like Deeksha Veiraiah’s ‘Dear Sunny’, Sara Fogarty Olmos’ ‘Eating Fruit’, and Francesca Brooks’ ‘Choosing jewels’;

Here are poems that destabilise notions of the self, of the body, with compelling diction, like Ellora Sutton’s ‘Bitch River’ and Natasha Tanna’s ‘endocrine romance’.

Here are poems that are ironic, heartfelt, explorative, subversive, inquisitive – and ultimately, so, so beautiful.

— Alycia Pirmohamed
May 2023