While painting "Threshold" a series of puzzles appeared. The shape and not shape, what was there and then not there, but still burned through the color, led to the horizontal divisions. Even the calligraphic markings, put in as scribbles but which came to have their own necessary place burned back through the layers. I love this painting best in the morning light when it literally glows, but I also love to watch it change with the day.
Liz Hawkes deNiord

Dear Readers:

Outside my window spring is in chaos: every conceivable color in surprising vibrance and lush greens from barely-greener-than-yellow to near black, all reminding me how rich our earth is, how abundant its gifts. Even the birds' songs seem richer and livelier. I feel the same way about Issue 35. It is as chock full, as variant in content, and as rich with talent as any issue we've ever published.

In his review of Mary Cornish's just-published first book of exquisite poems, Red Studio, TCR's Contributing Editor, David Rigsbee, comments on how that volume of poems "becomes noteworthy as it deepens . . ." a comment that equally describes Liz Hawkes deNiord's "Threshold," original art on our cover that also keeps offering more the longer you look. Check out her blogspot for more art at www.lizhawkesdeniord.blogspot.com.

Willis Barnstone continues the discussion that began in our Winter Feature dedicated to the sonnet, and Turner Cassity honors the tradition still alive in A.E. Stallings' newest release, Hapax, poems with a reverence to form that are as intelligent and freshly relevant as any poetry written today.

Issue 35 will have you thinking it's spring inside as you discover one surprise after another in the work of 18 poets and 2 fiction-writers: everything from "Bourbon Fire" to "Lichen Pastels," from "You Know How It Goes," to "What Was."