It is an obscenity, as one who makes their work in letters should know, but often refuses to know, to name any given selection The Best. Such determinations seem, desolately, to have become the work of letters itself. Competitions for best poem, competitions for funding, competitions to get into magazines, magazines for each competitive stage of your career, each making of itself a rung for the next magazine’s competition. Someone must judge these competitions, and so there is also a competition of judges: once one has amassed the requisite degree of cultural capital, one is invited to dispense helpings of such capital to the orphans holding out their bowls, a process which itself amasses capital to oneself, inviting further invitations for bigger ladles, bigger lines. I hope you will ask for more.

Surely there is nothing worse for words than to jostle for space, and yet I find myself – now there’s a cruel circumlocution: I chose to put myself – in the position of gatekeeper, reading a thousand poems and choosing twenty. A task which works against poetry itself, but one which we – with every manner of inequality masked by that pronoun – continually, helplessly create. Aside from making this unasked-for apology, itself a grotesque example of a growing genre, how was I to go about the task?

When I write, I follow my desire. Writing is the act of trusting that what one desires to say, truly desires, from a place beyond words and sense, from a place beyond the expectations and limitations of the listener, is worth saying. It is at once both the refusal to remain within the constraints of expression in which one has been raised and the simple longing for an audience. Writing is a prayer to be heard, if only by oneself. I went about making this selection by trusting in that same process, by trusting that what pleased me, what I was pulled towards in the same way I am pulled towards a bright mountain summit or the hidden source of birdsong, was worth gathering and sharing.

What chiefly pleases me at present is poetry that questions the terms of language itself. This may be by undoing the syntax of a sentence, by engaging the breadth of the page to summon the breath of the voice, by such insistence of repetition and definition as to collapse a single word in on itself, by summoning the antagonistic ghosts of English to undermine the false transparency of the planet’s dominating thought-system, by searching for a vocabulary plush and peculiar enough to expose the privation of the language of power, or by deploying hitherto unseen tactics in the guerrilla campaign against linguistic normality. You will find all these here, and more.

I offer my profoundest gratitude and my impossibly more profound regret to those who submitted their work for me to read and who do not appear in these pages: friends, strangers, those whose work I already admire, those whose work I hope to read again. It is a true gift to be offered your words to read. My thanks, too, to the poets who appear here, who each gave me something precious: delight. I hope that this selection, and the courageous souls within, who, like all poets, deserve the full bounty and responsibility of the earth, offers in return a cracked mirror through which to step, through which to make the world new.

— Harry Josephine Giles
November 2023