Letter From the Editors: Issue 47

March 2022

Dear Readers,

We write from darkest, dampest midwinter Syracuse, both of us for the last time in the pages of Salt Hill. As we leave our editor-in-chief roles with the publication of this issue, it’s only right that we thank our editorial team, our contributors, and our readers for keeping this endeavor alive. The task of puzzling together these poems, stories, essays, and works of visual art has not become easier the more we’ve done it, but nor has the joy that comes from it depleted along the way.

We begin Issue 47 with Gabrielle Grace Hogan’s moon, and we end with Bruce Bond’s sun. Stuffed into the night between them, there are failed dates and road trips, mechanized bees, fruit flies, and lobsters. Our writers pay homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, Maurice Blanchot, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Larry Levis, and of course—in what’s becoming Salt Hill tradition—Star Trek. And so many of them write of, and from, a whorl of transformation. Danielle Weeks invites you to consider “the new invertebrate body plan” as an al- ternative to your current, unsatisfying embodiment. Lee Anderson guides you through a makeup routine burnished with both comfort and uneasiness. And Luc Diggle points out “little lifelines / speeding us toward less lonely lives.”

We know it’s too much to say at the start of this terrifying new year that we’re emerging from anything into anything, or even from night into morning. Perhaps it’s just that we have to keep turning and transforming, seeing things anew. That’s the delight we’ve found in this issue and its writers. We hope you find it too.

— Jon Lemay and Sophie van Waardenberg