Editor’s Note, November 2025

The day I left home for good, my mother gave me a shoebox of photographs with their dates written in ballpoint on the back. Each picture was of some happening from childhood I’d mostly forgotten: a tree climbed in the Grand Canyon; a blurry, black kitten we named Batman; the blue and gold bike I got for a birthday, gleaming on the sidewalk outside our apartment; me in front of our black and white TV watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Reminiscing from our miraculously digital present, I can’t help but think of the manual labor each of the photos in that box took: loading film, queuing the flash, snapping the shot, resetting the film, developing the print. An entire, mostly obsolete system of physical motions to ensure that a memory has a foothold in the three-dimensional world.

Like many of us, my mother was trying to document what she thought was imperative for me inside all of her own imperatives. She was curating ephemera for my future self, and her choices were almost as important as the labor behind them. Maybe that’s why I’m so fascinated by tactile histories like photos, newspaper clippings, cassette tapes, and postcards. They allow us to make genuine collages of history, tapestries that simultaneously educate, remember, and warn. With so many of our spaces of learning and houses of history under attack, this various ephemera feels even more necessary than it did when my mother would whip out the Kodak to commemorate.

This might be the poet in me speaking, but in the face of AI alongside our other, unfathomable editing technologies, what we see is more complicated than our rods and cones can handle. And if we can’t trust our senses, it falls on poets—the original, unflinching documentarians—to renew their obligations as keepers of history through language.

Many of the poets in the November issue are already doing the griot work I’m hoping for. E. Ethelbert Miller’s labor on and off the page catalogs, challenges, and chastises the history we’ve been given. Tishani Doshi’s elegant “The Brainfever Bird, Confused by Seasons,” inspired by the Scottish poet John Burnside, highlights global connectedness with a poet for whom honesty and clarity were paramount. Abner Dormiendo’s kinetic poems about Antipolo, translated from the Filipino by Ethan Chua, confirm that poems can be historically global and local at the same time.

The poets in this issue show us that there are many ways to make the past available again despite the sensory maleficence around us. Poets in 2025 must maintain our own creative histories so that we might hang onto the things some people would rather we forget. Even if they remain open to interpretation, our words must be as tangible and irrefutable as that box full of photographs.