Issue > Editor's Note
Memory Bridge
photograph
by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Editor's Note

Welcome to this summer issue of The Cortland Review, celebrating the fine work of Poets House, one of the world's premier poetry centers. Located in New York City, Poets House is a vital hub boasting a 60,000-volume library, and a venue for workshops, readings and performances. Since 2012, its Emerging Fellows Program, funded by the Jerome Foundation, has invited 10 emerging writers to work with a distinguished and diverse faculty. This TCR issue showcases the work of all the 2015 fellows, and their mentor, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, as well as writers from the 2012-14 programs.

Griffiths, also a painter, photographer, videographer, and mixed-media artist, contributed our cover photograph, Memory Bridge, taken on one of her many trips to Delaware, where she was raised. "I photograph bridges frequently because they are powerful spaces for process," she comments. "I'm interested in how specific landscapes and types of architecture must be endured and understood to access memory. When I took this image my mother was very ill and my distress is refracted in the landscape and the storm." To see more of Griffiths' photographs, visit: www.rachelelizagriffiths.com.

Working with the Poet's House poets has presented TCR's editors with the opportunity to feature the breadth and diversity embodied by the Fellows Program. We delighted in the expansion of our perspective offered by the work you will read here. We hope you enjoy as much we do the fluidity of form, unflinching humanity, and historical resonances of these poems.

Special thanks to Lee Briccetti and Stephen Motika at Poet's House and to TCR's Editor, Ginger Murchison. And also to Managing Editor, Amy MacLennan, for keeping track of all TCR's loose ends, to David Moody, audio, and Rick Tracy, photography, for their technical smarts, and to Guy Shahar for founding us and building the TCR website that keeps getting better, and to you, too, of course, our readers for always coming back for more. Please, also, don't forget to check out the Poets House website at: www.poetshouse.org.

Cheers!

Jennifer Wallace
TCR Poetry Editor

Poetry

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Elegy

Poetry

Elizabeth Zuba

Elizabeth Zuba
Hard to Say

Poetry

Monica Hand

Monica Hand
Mask of Wires