I stepped outside of my managing editor role at Poetry is Dead to guest-edit Issue 13, “Secret Identities.” It combines two of my favourite things — prose-poetry and super-heroes. The prose-poem is a hybrid, a fusion, but so is the super-hero: as likely to involve dinosaurs, cyborgs, aliens, magic and thunder gods as they are to include domino masks and tights. Poems with line breaks were welcome, of course, because Batman must occasionally leap from building to building.
“Secret Identities” includes an essay on Jem & the Holograms and emotional labour by Cynara Geissler, excerpts from Alex Leslie‘s “Vancouver for Beginners,” an essay and prose-poems by andrea bennett and a poem about Batman by Kim Fu that was included in her new book, How Festive the Ambulance. The issue also features work by Marita Dachsel, David Alexander, Aaron Kreuter, Sina Queryas, Caroline Szpak and many other miraculous super-heroes of the poetry world.