Since it was first published in 1976, Derek Walcott's poem Love After Love has become something of a classic, its direct address and closing line "Feast on your life" expanding and contracting—like a breath—to orient the reader back to the self. 

 

Art is a paradox whereby work by strangers, consumed at a time-space distance from whence it came, becomes deeply personal. In rare instances such work, like Walcott's poem, survives by speaking to the individual self; millions of individual selves around the world. 

 

Some of the most difficult journeys we must take are often those at the shortest distance. In the past year, time and space, as many have previously understood them, have fractured, so too our sense of self; to the effect it is hard to know where to begin—or how—to heal and cohere again. 

 

Another paradox? On the one hand, our world has shrunk to a distance of streets and front yards, and at the same time we are being asked to process multiple tragedies at a global scale; the intersections of these tragedies; in countries we will never know, languages we will never speak, and with no tools at our disposal; without the resource of touch to comfort and guide us. 

 

In this issue, our contributors offer us multiple journeys, and deeply felt and personal work. Family archives, matrilineal inheritance, environmental activism, Mississippi men, and more; each a companion; each a journey; each a touch; each a tool. 

 

One definition of generosity, which might also be a definition of success, is to do and give what you can with what you have. This sounds, too, a premise for art. 

 

The table is set. Feast. 

 

—The Editors