The first signs of spring are often easy to miss—small buds along bare branches, rain moving across open spaces, light lingering a little later in the evening skies. After the dormancy of winter, things that seemed lost begin again, often in ways we notice only when we pause long enough. This year, those small changes feel especially significant. In a moment when the world seems especially unsettled, the slow persistence of the natural world offers a reminder: renewal rarely arrives all at once.
The work in this issue attends to those same rhythms as landscapes become places where memory, grief, and wonder unfold alongside the larger forces that shape them. Rivers carry reflection and loss, gardens hold a fragile abundance of life, storms gather over wide plains, and quiet moments in familiar places expose unexpected depth. Elizabeth Gunn’s opening poems move between the cosmic and the intimate, imagining asteroids, solstice light, and the fragile coordinates by which we orient ourselves in the universe. In George Looney’s work, rivers and distant shores become places where memory and absence echo against one another. Peter Leroe-Muñoz’s poems reflect on the quiet persistence of growth—trees rising, roots widening, lives separating and intertwining in ways that are both inevitable and mysterious.
Elsewhere in our spring issue, gardens and fields teem with life and contradiction. Deanna Benjamin catalogs the many shades of green that emerge in a living landscape, while Susan Barry-Schulz searches for a color that may not exist at all, hunting elusive blues scattered across clouds, water, and memory. Anne Mesquita’s poems move between family memory and the sudden violence of weather on the plains, while Mark Anthony Burke’s work follows rivers whose shifting currents become metaphors for risk, decision, and change.
Our spring issue also turns toward the ways memory shapes the landscapes we inhabit. Dominic Belmonte’s essay recalls childhood fishing trips that slowly reveal the hidden burdens carried by a father shaped by war. In Sarah Ellis’s poem, a well-intentioned act of dismantling an observation deck becomes a reflection on how easily human certainty can overlook the fragile ecosystems around us. Lucinda Trew reminds us that the earth itself is only “approximately spherical,” its imperfections part of the beauty that makes our world recognizable and strange at once. Throughout these pages, landscapes are not merely settings but participants—rivers, gardens, plains, and canyon walls that echo the inner lives of the people who move through them. Like the season itself, the work gathered here resists easy resolution, dwelling instead in the space between uncertainty and renewal and asking us to look more closely at the fragile, persistent life unfolding around us.
Issue Forty includes poetry and prose by Adam Breier, Amanda Adrienne Smith, Anne Mesquita, Dara Laine, Deanna Benjamin, Dominic Belmonte, Elizabeth Gunn, Eugene Stevenson, George Looney, Jenny Severyn, Lissa Staples, Lucinda Trew, Mara Adamitz Scrupe, Mark Anthony Burke, Peter Leroe-Muñoz, R.G. Evans, Richard Prins, Ruiyan Zhu, Sarah Ellis, Stephen Barile, Susan Barry-Schulz, and Ted Jean, along with images by Katherine Schander-Triplett and Lilianne Milgrom. The cover image is by Lilianne Milgrom.
Digital and print versions of our fall issue are available through Mag Cloud. Digital versions of the issue are free, and perfect-bound print copies of the issue cost twelve dollars. You can read the issue online and order print copies at this link.
WILLOWS WEPT REVIEW 