Editor’s Note, July/August 2026

Each year, Oxford University Press picks a word that is meant to somehow encapsulate the mood of the past 365 days. In 2025, OUP picked “rage bait,” which, while technically two words, reflects the proliferation of inflammatory content that is nearly inescapable online. It’s only July, but if I were to suggest a word for 2026, it would be “resilience.” That fact that we are still here, still reading and writing poems in the face of genocides, civil wars, and wannabe despots ginning up conflict for no reason speaks to our resilience. As Lucille Clifton writes in “won’t you celebrate with me,” “come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed.” Every day something tries to silence us, yet we persist.

Poetry-as-resistance is simultaneously grounded in the past, present, and future. Poets etch their inerasable histories in tercets and ghazals while cataloging resistance songs like griots. Resilience can take many forms in poetry, from humor to protest to the simple yet dangerous acts of witness and testimony. Poets testify with the best of them, as we see here in Tarik Dobbs’s poem “In Minneapolis,” which refuses to look away as ICE agents terrorized the people of Minneapolis early in the year. Or the self-reflection of Daniel Durand’s poem translated by Jordan Landsman, “Walking in the Winds of Boedo,” which questions our perpetual unease: “and I wonder why men/only think about things that torment us.”

Some of the most profound examples of witness and testimony appear in this issue’s folio, “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets.” Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem, the curators of this folio, founded City of Asylum/Detroit, which offers fellowships to writers and artists who have been exiled or endangered because of their work. When I first learned about the program, along with its sister organizations in Pittsburgh and Ithaca, I was struck by the audacity and care involved in opening up a space for poets who have run afoul of autocrats abroad. As Kraftowitz and Salem write in their introduction to the folio, the layered experience of exile is “a state of being that may be best expressed in the slanted, broken lines of poetry.” At a time when the number of asylum seekers continues to rise worldwide, the urgency of their work is only matched by the necessity of it. 

“Broken Lines” gathers voices shaped by displacement and the complicated poetics of survival. It shows that resilience is not an ideal, but is instead a fact of life for many poets across the globe. We hope this folio introduces you not just to a group of remarkable poets, but also to the conditions they’ve endured and the language they’ve carried with them. It’s an honor to share their work with you, and to support City of Asylum’s vital mission in whatever small ways we can.