From the Editor: December 2023 Poetry

I’m the kind of person who likes to find her niche and stay there. When I started at Literary Mama in 2012, I was an editorial assistant for the Literary Reflections department. Even after two years in that role, I wasn’t particularly keen to become a department editor when invited to do so—although I did. I was similarly disinclined to move away from Literary Reflections when a position in the Poetry department opened in 2021. It wasn’t just a matter of inertia. As a poet, I enjoyed working on essays. I felt that I was keeping literary skills in trim that might otherwise grow ragged, and that I was perhaps more generous with prose than I could be with poetry. As it turned out, moving to Poetry was an invigorating change of pace, but one that required me to be less generous, as it involved making many more hard decisions.   

Regular readers of Literary Mama will know that a typical issue includes only eight to ten poems. With an acceptance rate between five and ten percent, we shortlist many more poems than we can publish. Even so, we’re honored to be considered a worthy home for accomplished and distinctive work that’s intimately meaningful to the artists we meet in our inbox. 

This special issue features 31 poems that touched us with their beauty, their honesty, or their unique approach to storytelling through verse. Consider them our December gift to you. 

Libby Maxey
Senior Editor and Poetry Editor