Editor's Note

"Boxing Day," our Issue 67 cover art, is the work of Oakland artist Ani Thompkins who studied painting at San Francisco Art Institute. She attempts to capture the intangibles of intimacy through abstraction and washed layers of color. Staining on raw fabrics lends to illumination, adding to the sense of suggestion over intention. "Boxing Day," Ani says, "is about all that the touch of a hand can hold."

Because each piece is an outward presentation of a very personal experience, Ani invites the viewer to step in and find his or her own interpretation, to find his or her own experience inside the frame.

For the same reason, The Cortland Review contributors present poems and short stories that are completed when readers bring their own experiences to the page. For those opportunities in Issue 67, we thank poets Jean C. Berrett, Sally Blumis-Dunn, Aozora Brockman, Catherine Carter, Elaine Fletcher Chapman, Alice Clara Gavin, Michael Hololka, Josh D. Kaischeur, Dore Kiesselbach, Brandon Krieg, Peter LeBerge, Steve Lambert, Jennie Malboeuf, Peter Munro, Joe Pan, Simon Perchik, Nora Hutton Shepard, Matthew Stark, Vivian Teter, John Sibley Williams and Matthew Wemberley and fiction contributors Douglas Cole, Tal S. Halpern, Ryan Lott and J.T. Townley.

NOTABLE MENTION AUDIO
For Issue 67's "notable mention audio," David Moody, Cortland Review's Web and Sound Editor, chooses Peter Munro's reading of "The Jack Knife." David writes,

Peter Munro brings a sonorous and reactive voice to Cortland Review. His poem "The Jack Knife" is divided into six sections, and for each section Munro adjusts his reading to express its tensions and reliefs. Early sections are expressed with the pace of narrative--quick, moving forward into outcome. When Munro slows his reading it is on the reoccurring line "the proper denomination exceeds me." Each of the three times the line is voiced, the excess and emptiness it leaves behind lingers in the long creek of "exceeds." It is upon the hinge of this word's opening that Munro unfolds the poem's edge.