Issue 19 [Summer 2026] – LETTERS JOURNAL

SUMMER 2026

LETTERS: from the Editors

Dear Reader:

Most sighted people can claim to have seen a butterfly. But have they really? (And please, as with all visual art in this issue, click the image for a full-screen view.) There is an often-ignored difference between seeing and seeing, between noticing and observing, between a basic knowledge of something—a sister, a loon cry, communion—and an encounter with the depths of a sister, a loon cry, communion.

The Summer 2026 issue of LETTERS is bursting with works of poetry, prose, and visual art that urge us toward attunement—perhaps with a close-up view, as with the wings in “Fallen Angels,” or perhaps thanks to a striking angle, or through a common tune—so that the familiar becomes foreign and the foreign familiar, and we become freshly aware of the depth of things—including, certainly, our own lives.

So where would you like to begin? With the reexamination of an old story about a demon-possessed man? With a photograph whose title and sweeping horizon ask us to consider what is both concrete and empty in our memories? With a meditation on gray not just as a color but as a state of mind? With the encounters and dreams of a young woman selling tickets to a cathedral? With a god who is “weeping / mad honey from gouged eyes”?

Jack Gilbert says in a 2005 interview with the Paris Review, “When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out.” The work in Issue 19 matters to us and has, indeed, knocked us out. The scope of imagination in this issue, from the soft underbelly of marriage seen through a nativity-set Mary’s eyes to a current-day Jesus Christ preoccupied with citrus to a reflection on cataclysm at the Museum of Natural History, reveals in both ourselves and the writers that small grace—a caterpillar steadily unveiling his wings—that lives in all of us, at times larger than others, that follows the pull to create something new. That follows the pull to witness.

What would you like to witness today? And where would you like to be when you do it? There is no main entrance. Every door is the right door. Art only asks that we start somewhere, then keep going.

Remi and Mindy close with our heartfelt thanks to Ren Manuel, who graduates this month from Yale Divinity School, for their keen and generous eye on all things visual art. We will miss working with them and look forward to seeing where their art takes them next.

Sincerely,

Mindy Misener, Remi Recchia, & Ren Manuel
Editors
May 2026

Nonfiction

The Works of Mercy
Isaiah Lewis

Meg
Mari Ramler

Verities of Gray
Scott F. Parker

The Difficulty of Simplicity
Brandon McNeice

Poetry

The Terms of the Covenant
Sky Burial
least
Chaim ben Avram

Fourteen Miracles Just Yesterday
Steve Myers

Matins on Lake Sagatagan
Laura Reece Hogan

Waiting for My Identical Sister’s Baclofen Pump Surgery to End
Palsy
Mary Somerville McSparran