We opened submissions for our first issue of Feral on February 1, which now seems like a thousand years ago. Sometime in the first week of February I got sick with a stomach bug and a co-worker made a joke asking if it could be corona virus. I literally didn’t know what they were talking about and had to search on Google. Now here we are on April 1st in the middle of a global pandemic. If you’re looking for social or political commentary, I’m not the right person. But as a poet, I can tell you that being able to bring you this first issue is an act of hope and our love letter to the world during a very scary time.
I want to thank Elisabeth Horan, the Editor-in-Chief of Animal Heart Press, who had the vision of adding an online journal to AHP…and for trusting me to bring that idea to life. Thank you to my wonderful readers, Ade and Sam, who considered hundreds of poems and art pieces and helped me make some very difficult decisions, and also led me in directions I might not have otherwise gone. Thank you to Amanda McLeod, Managing Editor at Animal Heart Press, who built our website and created our beautiful journal. And most importantly, thank you to our contributors for trusting us with your work.
We told potential contributors that we could not guide them in terms of style or “what we like.” We asked them to show us what they wanted Feral to be, to surprise us. We told them that we wanted the work to speak for itself. And as the submissions poured in, the Feral team agreed that we were looking for work that was emotionally brave, thematically engaging, with a strong voice and craft. We also wanted to bring you an eclectic group of poets and artists.
And so it is with a great deal of excitement (I think giddy is probably the right word) that we bring you Issue 1 of Feral. Our contributors live in 10 countries and 14 US states. Our youngest contributor is 18 and our oldest is 70-ish. We have poets with just a few publishing credits to their name and poets with multiple books/chapbooks. We have artists who can claim this as their first publication and artists whose work has been shown and purchased both nationally and internationally. We are proud to add them all to the Feral family.
On a personal note, I would like to add that today (April 1) would have been my granddaughter Daisy’s seventh birthday, had she not died unexpectedly from SIDS at the age of seven months. Her life and death reignited my poet soul, and so this is also a birthday present to her.
Beth Gordon
Managing Editor