Editor’s Note, March 2026

For the early Romans, the year was only ten months long and March was the first month on their calendar. It was a natural choice for the start of the year since March in the Mediterranean brings about the spring equinox and the beginning of the thaw. They named their first month after Mars, the god of war and secondarily of agriculture, protector of the land and its new growth. Renewal is as welcome now as it was back then, especially after another blustery Chicago winter. Somehow the colors of spring help offset all the months of gray, the lingering tufts of snow everywhere, and all those frozen sidewalks still crunchy with salt. 

Not all renewal is as radical or as dramatic as the seasonal kind. People
quietly renew library books they haven’t finished, TV shows get renewed after a couple of successful episodes, and painters renew their practices every time they stretch a fresh canvas. Poets renew words and phrases poem by poem as they try to uncover the secret, yet communal moments of their lives. In this March issue, Catherine Pierce revitalizes the idea of domesticity by reimagining our daily obligations as “piles/of undone, the tangle of should and will and want.” Rick Barot’s elegant “Capilano” deepens the idea of renewal through the physical world and its quiet cycles: “rain is the sound of geology breathing.” And Asa Drake refreshes the phrase “I love you” in her beautifully unexpected duo of poems titled “To someone who’s heard ‘I love you’ too many times.”

Now I’m wondering if renewal isn’t a necessity for art rather than simply a possibility. Renewal is the engine behind julie ezelle patton’s visual poetics, always humming between letters, always shifting across her various kinds of art. The folio in this issue, “J Walking Through the Alphabet,” comes from her eponymous Nightboat Books title forthcoming at the end of this month. For those new to her work, patton—poet, performer, conjurer—has spent a career remaking artistic frameworks, whether they’re visual, textual, or something only she knows how to name. In her poems and in her multidisciplinary installations, she makes renewal legible for the rest of us. It shows up in the materials, in the language, in the elastic imagination that threads the physical to the spiritual. Her work carries the virtuosity and vitality of that first newness the Romans decided to name March.