Editor’s Note, June 2026

As you might imagine, our editorial team at Poetry reads an extraordinary number of submissions to curate every issue of the magazine. We receive more than eight thousand poems each month from poets all over the world. That volume of reading is both a gift and a challenge; there is no way the four poetry editors on our team could manage it alone. Which is why we rely on the grace and expertise of five external readers to ensure that each poem is treated with the care and attention it deserves. Between the nine of us, submissions are not only manageable, but remain one of the most energizing parts of our work.

This month marks the end of the tenure for five readers who have been working with us since May 2023: Hadara Bar-Nadav, Rob Colgate, Jay Gao, I.S. Jones, and Trevor Ketner. Over the past three years, we’ve spent countless hours together talking about poems—some of which you’ve encountered
in the pages of the magazine, and even more that we had to decline for a range of editorial reasons. Along the way, we’ve had sustained conversations about how to read generously and how to meet any cultural and political moment with attentiveness and care. Together we’ve tried to uphold the magazine’s commitments to access and inclusion, always with the hope of bringing the freshest and most inspiring voices in contemporary poetry to our pages.

Their insights have refined my sense of what a poem can do while also changing the way I come to the poetic page. Through our conversations I’ve learned 
so much about the complexities of translation, the multiple dimensions of visual poetry, and the possibilities of experimental work. I’m deeply grateful for their curiosity, their thoughtfulness, and the seriousness with which they entered the editorial room each time we gathered to talk about submissions. The readers continually reminded me that ethical editorial work is a shared poetic discovery that, to paraphrase Horace, both informs and delights.

I want to share this with you because the June issue you’re holding, which is the first all-poems issue we’ve published in a bit, includes many poems first discovered and championed by this group of readers. Whether it’s Despy Boutris’s “Due to Popular Demand, I Am Coming Out,” whose playful title gestures toward the wit and abundance within, or Kristin Dykstra’s translation of Manuel Becerra’s epic “Ars Poetica from the Protector of Asses, André Breton Dixit,” this issue bears the imprint of their attention. Each piece ended up in the magazine because one of the readers spent hours reading, annotating, and wondering the way good poems invite us to wonder. Week after week these five readers, who are wonderful poets in their own right, came to our editorial conversations with a remarkable openness of spirit. It’s the same openness I hope you feel as you read the work their efforts helped bring into the world.