Mark Fogarty

The Red Wheelbarrow 13 Mark Fogarty

A POET A WEEK! The year 2020 is going to be remembered for several things, not least of them how we found beauty, meaning and puzzlement and recorded them here, in our lucky 13th Red Wheelbarrow anthology! Feature poet Zorida Mohammed joins more than 50 other poets pushing The Red Wheelbarrow in the direction of sanity, With 52 poets published here, our prescription for an antidote to a crazy year is to read a poet a week. Mohammed's poetry looks back on her Caribbean upbringing and the forces that forged her adult life in America as a poet with an uncommonly keen memory and descriptive gift. In addition we have published a short story that revisits her relationship with her grandfather in Trinidad. And after the feature on Mohammed, our lead poet is Rachel Wagner, whose brilliant "Men Follow Me to My Car in the Dark" will ring true to every woman and should be read by every man. Wagner is followed by R. Bremner, whose poem about the thoughts that flashed through his mind while enduring a stroke is instantly memorable. And that's just the first three poets! The 13th edition of our RWB is loaded with great poetry, essays and artwork, including the expressive line drawing doodles of Donald Zirilli and the hopeful cover art by Paul Leibow, "Women's Future," underlining the themes of the nearly two dozen women poets published here. Get ready for some great literary adventures. You'll find within these pages the vengeful nature of Osage oranges (Susanna Lee), the story of a hunchback right out of New York Gothic (Ken Vennette) and a mini-epic merging the stories of Hiawatha, the Last of the Mohicans, and a modern-day immigrant to New York City (Petraq Risto). That poem, and the book, ends with Michelangelo's finger of God pointing at the Statue of Liberty. A grand image to put up against a year filled with disasters. We also add a tribute or two to our retiring founding editor, Jim Klein, who it has been my privilege to succeed. The intelligence and energy of our one-a-week poets show that this anthology has a great future as well as an illustrious past. -MARK FOGARTY, Editor