Greetings, dear ones, to ballast’s 2024 summer issue.

You can call it as such. Or Issue 2.3. Or our seventh issue. Or get more creative. Sky’s the limit.

At the present moment, however, I’m thinking of it coinciding with the double-brood cicada emergence. From where I’m writing in South Bend, the noise has not been cacophonous, though I have indeed begun to hear the characteristic chainsaw whirring of these once-dormant love bugs. 

It’s a grating sound, if you’re unfamiliar, when that one lone buzzing sings out into the void. And yet a uneasy and long-brewing harmony erupts when two or more reverberations begin—sometimes in chorus, sometimes call-and-response. Poetry. The whole of it. The singular and the choir. No one left out. Each sound a clamor screaming for its place.

At ballast, as you’ve heard us chime again and again, we’re guided by an ethos of “more and more poetry.” We welcome the din, the dire, the discordant. For this introduction, I merely hope to pluck out a resonance from each individual harp string amid the glissando of this issue. How varied this din is. And what harmony erupts nonetheless.

So a roll call, if you will, for this present exhibit. Shoutouts to all of our contributors for their buzzing.

• We’re elated and honored to have standout translations this issue, featuring the work of Cho Ji Hoon (translated from the Korean by Sekyo Haines), Roelof ten Napel (translated from the Dutch by Judith Wilkinson), and Amelia Rosselli (translated from the Italian by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard).

• Isabel Bezerra Balée brings us an ekphrastic take on Henri Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre in “Joy of Life.”

• Kieran McGrath’s extended “Relatório” and Chris McCreary’s “Bode” each offer a kind of cosmopolitan identity and visionary mythmaking; in a related vein, Matt Dennison’s “Omaha” and Lisa Loop’s “Object Permanence” endow this issue with recollections of nostalgic traditions for a ruptured category of fatherhood and an autotheory pastiche, respectively.

• We see ongoing entries, renewals, and disruptions of set forms like Katie Beswick’s touching and challenging sestina “All My Fears Now Are For My Daughter,” Nicholas Pierce’s “dirtying” of the sonnet in his Crude series, and Paula Reed Nancarrow’s “Ode to the Mortician’s Good Intentions” which shows, alongside many of the best odes, the open-endedness and surprise of what an ode can hold space for.

• We also feature invented forms—or at the very least the impulse toward them—in work like Mervyn Seivwright’s “Sunrising from the Mind” series or the seemingly contradictory combination of Desmond Kon’s monostich and catalogue in “Scene of Saint Martin.”

• The necessary plasticity and slipperiness of the lyric category are represented well in this issue, as the various explorations and reverberations of the lyric “I” can attest to in Erica Anderson-Senter’s “All of That Is Gathered for the Birds,” Edward Anki’s “At Dusk on Cherry Beach,” Katherine Chiemi’s “refinements,” Anoushka Kumar’s “Poem in Waiting,” Abu Ibrahim’s world-achy “Body Language” and “Safe,” and the quotidian intrigue and humor of C. W. Bryan’s “This Is Not a Love Poem.”

• We’ve got a veritable rush of lush and even aggressive language play and alchemical metaphorical transformations in Zoë Bodzas’s “july horoscope” and Ann Pedone’s excerpt from The Greenland and the discordant hodgepodge of blended registers that end up harmonizing in Matt Pasca’s diptych “What the Baha’i Boy Said to the Platypus” and “What the Platypus Said to the Baha’i Boy.”

• It’s only fitting, too, that the natural world creeps and seeps into this issue’s nooks and crannies, from the imagistic naturalism and new modes of reference in Steve Carll’s “cloudcradled” and Taylor Franson-Thiel’s “Hymn for Stained Glass” to the longed-for intimacy and affect in Vikki C.’s “Skin Deep In What We Cannot Own” and Matthew Church’s “Warning for the Angry.”

• And, finally, I want to give a special shoutout to Benjamin Patterson, whose poem “Pharmakos” marks his first publication and which carries a poetic sophistication all the more impressive given his fifteen years. A true pleasure of ballast is to place new and emerging writers alongside more established poets, and Benjamin’s work here is a phenomenal example of holding space open for the voices who’ve yet to be heard.

Dizzy yet? I hope so. That feeling of overwhelm is by design. I hope you can welcome the din; it’s already welcomed you.

—   Jacob Schepers, for ballast