Thirteen years ago, Lantern Review began from a place of hunger. As young poets and editors, we created the journal because we craved the company of other voices like our own and longed to see ourselves represented in literary spaces. Looking back, it’s amazing to consider where that desire has taken us—and how it has transformed us—in the years since.
Since our first issue in June 2010, we’ve published 138 writers and 38 visual artists in our magazine. We’ve run over 500 interviews, book reviews, writing prompts, reflection pieces, craft reflections, and more on our blog. For a time, our newsletter, Lumen, brought reflections on the writing life to your email inboxes. We’ve presented events highlighting Asian American poets offsite at AWP and in partnership with the American Bookbinders Museum. We’ve shared poetry tastings, mappings, literary care kits, mini broadsides, zines, and more with the public at conferences and festivals from coast to coast.
Together, we’ve persevered through fallow periods and hiatuses and each time have found our way back to the work. We’ve weathered a pandemic, have raged together against literary yellowface, have made space for our collective grief in the wake of anti-Asian hate crimes. We’ve knit together a community, and as we’ve grown, our hunger itself has been transformed. No longer is it lonely, private, a fearsome ache in an empty belly. Today, our longing is different—it’s the type of yearning that compels us, having tasted such abundance, to desire yet more.
This finale issue, one of our finest yet, brims with appetite for the world in its wondrous detail, its flashing spurs and blood-jet feathers. These poems, possessed by a violent hunger, a howling at the moon, demand more, more. Charged with ferocity and yearning, they hunger for worlds beyond, conjuring dreamscapes, the afterlife, memory, and ancestral presence. Here are “ghostmama & ghostpapa,” haunting us in the mirror; here are our inarticulable spiritual longings, our hunger for the legends and flight logs that might orient us to our origins.
Amidst violence, surveillance, and disease, these poems speak to the desire to be held—to be beheld—with acceptance and love; to be seen and understood as we see and understand ourselves, even in the face of the devastating logics of racism and gender binaries. Through the collective wisdom gathered in this issue, we’re offered recipes for life, informing us what to cook and how, alongside instructions for living and for dying. “Hear your stomach?” these works prompt, reminding us to honor our appetites and not to forget that it’s our deepest hungers—for justice, for nourishment and renewal—that will guide us in shaping the world that is to come.
As you read this final offering of Lantern Review, we hope that you will feast and be filled. May these poems accompany you into everything the future holds.
Peace and Light,
Iris A. Law & Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Lantern Review Editors