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This new issue marks the seventh anniversary of Blood Orange Review. Everything changes in seven years. If my calculations are correct, I have consumed 5,110 cups of coffee, eaten 728 slices of vegetarian pizza, and accumulated 5,096 hours of a sleep debt since our first issue. The computer, the desk and the phone that we used to create issue 1.1 no longer exist, and every cell in my skeleton has been replaced since then. And yet, approximately 320 gallons of coffee later, I still love the magnetic force that appears when an issue comes together.
In Cameron Aveson’s bio, he comments, “There’s a moment that can happen during the writing-revision process for me when it feels like I’m not just pushing the words around the page but when, collectively, they start to push back. At that point it feels like I enter into a different relationship with the poem, when it is working on me as much as I am working on it.”
His description of the language push-back explains the powerful chorus of voices that unite in this issue: voices of a trail worker, a salesman, Monet, theater patrons, Hemingway reincarnated as Liberace, and the sad sows of Noah’s ark. At first, you might not think these disparate personae speak to one another, but they do.
Although each writer has a unique approach, most of the poems in this issue articulate and honor the changes that transform our lives, one cell at a time. These shifts are sorrowful and gorgeous and inexplicable all at once. Wendy Drexler affirms in her poem, “Let’s touch all of it,” and I am with her.
H.K. Hummel, editor
Blood Orange Review
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