With this issue, ballast enters its third year coming your way hot-n-ready like a Little Caesars pizza: it’s a cheaply (but lovingly) bootstrapped endeavor looking to feed a crowd, the hungry masses, the downtrodden, the curious, the 5000.

Perhaps a sign of the times, but I’ve been mulling over the significance of community lately—the niche, the local, the writ large, the various, the problematic, the popular—and in ballast’s adherence to our self-imposed mandate of “more and more and more poetry,” I’m quite proud and more than a little grateful for the community that the ballast vortex has generated from the far-reaching pockets of the universe. Sara and I aren’t exactly SEO whiz kids or social influencers; rather, as we readily admit, we do this for the love of the game. Our labors (rough hewn though they may be) are homegrown and, we’ve found, thrive from the word-of-mouth buzz that you, our dear readers and contributors and contributors to be, generate on our behalf. And so it’s to our delight when we have the opportunity to feature repeat contributors across multiple issues and years, to celebrate contributor’s inclusions in each issue via our social channels, and to hear—and spread—news of our former contributors’ wider successes as grants, awards, and full-volume collections make their way into the world. We’re all about the “publish and flourish” (because “publish or perish” is bunk); in other words, we’re all about abundance as opposed to scarcity. More and more and more, after all. And in that, we’re nothing without you all, xx.

Dripping sentiment aside, it’s in this spirit of community and the grassroots excitement about our island of misfit toys that we’re most indebted to and which propel us into ballast year three and beyond. Every one of our contributors gets listed on our issues’ table of contents, of course, but I want to single each of them out in this space afforded me as well, because each recognition by name is our way of sharing the wealth, spreading the love, and divvying up the laurels.

• Glenn Bach

• D. W. Baker

• Ali Beheler

• Sarah Cahalan

• Jo Ann Clark

• will Cordeiro

• Nelle Yvon

• Lauren Crawford

• Stephan Delbos

• Miriam Drev translated by Barbara Siegel Carlson

• Barbara Duffey

• Karen Earle

• Hendri Hulius Wijaya translated by Edward Gunawan

• LC Gutierrez

• Summer J. Hart

• Dennis Hinrichsen

• Jad Josey

• Daniel Lehan

• Sam Moe

• Daniel Edward Moore

• Joe Nasta

• M. P. Powers

• nat raum

• Michael Robins

• Barnaby Smith

• Matthew Sobin

• and Jiayi Zhang

In addition, we’re proud to include in this issue our various “features”—some familiar and some for the first time:

• For our “Dialogues,” we thrilled to bear witness to the correspondence between Hendri Yulius Wijaya and translator Edward Gunaway, between Matthew Sobin and Michael Robins, between Will Cordeiro and Jo Ann Clark, and between D. W. Baker and Barbara Duffey

• For our “Voices,” we’re graced with readings from Ali Beheler’s sonnet crown and nat raum’s “to a home on god’s celestial shore”

• For our “Reviews,” previous ballast contributor Connor Fisher shares on Christian J. Collier’s collection Greater Ghosts

• And, for the first time, we share an in-house “Interview” where poets can talk back: Dennis Hinrichsen was kind enough to share robust and profound insights with me as we celebrate the release of his Dominion + Selected Poems, recently released by Green Linden Press.

We so hope you relish perusing the abundance. Verweile doch, du bist so schön. Bitte, and vielen dank!

—   Jacob Schepers, for ballast