Allison Joseph on COR'S Apple Issue

The Age of Anxiety

This current issue of Crab Orchard Review reflects the core tensions, anxieties, disappointments, and griefs that are always a feature of living, but in this issue’s pages, the dial is turned up, to quote the script from the late, great Rob Rceiner’s “Spinal Tap,” to eleven. The writers in these pages are writing poems and prose about bouts with physical pain, emotional malaise, generational trauma, and worldly disasters. In editing this issue of Crab Orchard Review, we chose works that reflected these struggles—creations that intrigued us whether they were mourning the end of marriages, the loss of bodily autonomy to disease, the aftermath of losing closest loved ones, or the struggle with wanting to stay alive. All that sounds pretty dire, but I firmly believe in the ability of creative writing and creative writers to document, preserve, and honor all our various moods and modes. If poets and prose writers are grappling with the world’s current and cosmic difficulties, I feel a responsibility as an editor to present those visions to an audience willing to hang on for the ride. In a world of AI dupes and virtual trickery, it’s easy to forget how deeply felt a poem can be, how transformative an essay or short fiction. The work in this issue reflects our sacred need to see our sorrows and our joys reflected in language—language that perhaps started with a line scrawled in a notebook or typed in a Notes app, lines maybe scrawled on a stray scrap paper or on typed on laptop between flights. We hope you enjoy the poems and prose pieces in this issue, as we always do. I don’t have any solid answers to the world’s ills, other than to encourage us all to keep writing everything down: the bad memories and the good ones, the protest poems and poems of bitter resignation, the prose we fear no one else will want to read. Writers must continue to “tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson told us of truth-telling. Because the truth is that there’s beauty in the telling, even if our stories and poems are born out of our fears and traumas. There’s satisfaction in the sorrow, strength in the speaking out. I hope you find some of that satisfaction and strength in these works. I certainly did.