The Bio Issue: Fourteen Poets, Plus a Surprise

Introduction by Susan Terris

The Bio Issue—how wonderful it's been to receive your poems and your creative bios. As always, it's a difficult job to select from among the large numbers of submissions we receive. I'm often asked: What makes the difference between what gets selected and what doesn't? A hard question to answer—but at the same time, an easy one. I want to be surprised. I want poems that move me, that make my heart thump. Most of the poems submitted to In Posse Review are excellent, well-crafted poems; but some have that extra spark and sparkle.

When you read through what has been selected, some of you who submitted work for this issue but did not have poems selected will have what I like to call The-New-Yorker-Poetry-Syndrome. What are the symptoms of this particularly malady? Just one actually—the firm conviction that what was chosen was not any better than what you submitted. This is what happens when one reads the New Yorker poems week after week and has one's mother/spouse/friend/self say: Your work is every bit as good as a just-published poem by X. This may actually not be paranoia but fact. So what is the difference? Subjectivity. All editorial choices are, finally, subjective. I can't even apologize for this, because agreeing to be editor means to be willing to make choices, even if they are sometimes unfathomable ones.

So what do I like? Many different types of poetry. I like a mix of styles and a variety of voices, a mixture of short and long poems. I like some balance of male & female voices, of tenderness and toughness. Love and death always compete for space in any poetry selection, so does the way we feel about our loved ones, ex-loved ones, parents, and children. This edition of In Posse Review features a teen Jesus, a rhino, a suicide, several dandelions, a Dodge Dart, a cassava farm in Nigeria, rotting grapefruit peel, a game of stickball, insomnia, an ad about "Girls Gone Wild", an apotheosis, a Hello Kitty coloring book, a bulldozer, Osip Mandelstam, a pair of bravery pants, an assortment of ghosts, and so much more.

Our call for submissions produced a major, unpredictable surprise: the creative bios sent in with the submissions are amazing. In fact, they are so good they seem to stand alone as small prose poems, as a series of brief ars poeticas, and I selected 17 of them to publish. They are listed as Prose Poem Bios: B to Z. Therefore, in this edition of In Posse, though I seldom do so, I have also listed the contributing poets (almost) alphabetically.

I hope you enjoy the poems by the poets included here. I hope you will read and love the creative bios, too.

Thank you for your poems and your bios—you who had work accepted or didn't, you who are poets, you who may or may not be poets but are avid readers of poetry. Move along now to encounter these bio poems and these particular lives. You may find yourself on a trip of many twists and turns with an unreliable map. But I hope, instead of feeling lost, that you will enjoy the journey.

--Susan Terris, Poetry Editor

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