The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the 2020 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Victoria C. Flanagan’s Glossary of Unsaid Terms. The collection, chosen by the editors, grapples beautifully with the challenges of inheritance—physical, cultural, and psychic.

When you subscribe to the BPJ, you’ll receive as part of your subscription a copy of the forthcoming chapbook in the series. Not a subscriber? Purchase a copy of Glossary of Unsaid Terms here.

Of Jude Nutter’s poem, Ellen Bass writes, “‘Visible Woman, Visible Man’ is a capacious, complex poem. Building on striking diction, fresh metaphors, and precise narration, the poet considers the human body and the whole of the physical world, reaching back and forward in time—an ambitious journey which she carries off with aplomb. Intellectually satisfying and emotionally moving, this is a poem which deepens with each successive reading.”

We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest.

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The Spring 2020 issue features new work by Michael Bazzett, Tova Benjamin, Erica Bodwell, Susanna Brougham, Lauren Camp, Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Hedgie Choi, Caleb Curtiss, Carol Ann Davis, Lisa Furmanski, Jenn Givhan, Lisa Beech Hartz, Athena Kildegaard, Elaine Mintzer, Jefferson Navicky, Mark Neely, Linnea Nelson, Dawn Potter, Anna V. Q. Ross, Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, Jeffrey Schwaner, Lauren Shapiro, Matthew Buckley Smith, Eleanor Stanford, Lolita Stewart-White, Adam Tavel, Claire Wahmanholm, David Winter, and Lauren Yates. Also, Dawn Potter reviews books by Denise Bergman and Stacy R. Nigliazzo.

Cover image by Amy Bennett.

We stand with the people and with the many magazines and presses who have signed on to this statement written by the staff of The Offing, condemning anti-Blackness in publishing and the world, affirming the rights and righteousness of protestors, and calling on each of us to unlearn oppression.