OCHO #16

OCHO #16: MiPOesias Magazine Print Companion

Guest Edited by Barbara Jane Reyes

Featuring new work by Tara Betts, Brian Dean Bollman, Ching-In Chen, Sasha Pimentel Chacón, Linh Dinh, Sarah Gambito, Jessica Hagedorn, Jaime Jacinto, Nathaniel Mackey, Craig Santos Perez, Matthew Shenoda, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Truong Tran, Dillon Westbrook, Debbie Yee

Cover Art: “Imperialism, 24″ by Juan Carlos Quintana.

Buy your copy here.

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From the Introduction:

“A poem is not a Pop Tart.”
— Martín Espada

[...]

My intent is not to forward any single clique, club, or school of poetry/poetic thought, but rather, to present something of a living Venn Diagram that is the multiple poetic communities we inhabit, and that necessarily come into contact and collision with one another, responding and reacting to one another, yielding manifold outcomes.

Many of the poets included here are (or were previously, or were at some point) Northern California/San Francisco Bay Area based, where the poetic work is as varied as the area’s microclimates, and it is nearly impossible to adhere strictly to any sole aesthetic project. This is my poetic home base. All of these poets inhabit growing and converging, interbreeding poetic communities which are as formalistically and aesthetically diverse as they are ethnically, culturally, historically, and linguistically diverse. This is what I believe our poetry communities ought to be: Not circumscribed by or coerced into any singular, dominant ideology of a gated, locked, and guarded system, but rather, uncorralled, uncorseted.