Note from the Editor, Mike Bove: Fall 2026

While traveling recently, I found myself with a few unstructured hours of waiting in a hotel lobby. Unlike so many of the hotel lobbies I’ve been stranded in over the years, this one had incredibly comfortable chairs. (I’d even say they were the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in, but that’s another story.) From where I sat, I had the perfect vantage point for people-watching.

There’s something inherently fascinating about the nuances of other people's lives. I watched friends talking, families juggling children to the elevator, people asking for directions. Someone spilled coffee. A couple had a disagreement. There was laughter, chatter. The occasional sneeze.

What does any of this have to do with poetry?

I’ve always loved the way a poem can take a common experience and transform it, through language, into something that feels mysterious and unique, but familiar. I love poems for the way they encourage deep reflection, for their offer of insight, and for the simple pleasure of words and their sounds.

But I also love them for their intimate displays of very small, very personal moments of ordinary human life. They are in many ways another form of people-watching. We read them and know one another better. And that, I think, is an act of respect, even love: to watch each other kindly, and with attention.

The poems we’ve collected in the Fall 2026 issue of Hole In The Head Review encourage just such engagement, I hope, and we offer them with a reminder: every human gesture holds a collective story of past, present, and future. They are beautiful or tragic, simple or complex. They belong to all of us.

Note from the Prose Poetry Editor, Jefferson Navicky: Fall 2026

In an interview about his astonishing book of prose poems I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon 2025), poet Richard Siken said that after a stroke, he could not write lineated poetry. Siken was the author two previous collections of poetry, but now he was in trouble. The stroke left him with towering challenges throughout his life, not the least of which was the loss of poetry. Breaking the line confused him too much; he couldn’t continue his train of thought. So he had to seek rehabilitation through work with the sentence and the methodical way it plods along, one word after the next. What frisson he created had to come from the leaps in between sentences.

Aside from the terrible misfortune Siken suffered with the stroke, I love this story for a few reasons. First, it so clearly elucidates the vertiginous quality of poetry. Poetry flies off the cliff of every line, and that’s thrilling, potentially confusing, and ultimately definitive towards what makes poetry poetry.

Secondly, I love what it says about prose poetry, and how prose poetry is, in comparison, grounded. Prose poetry must roll along on the ground while poetry takes to the sky. But of course, this distinction, in its hierarchical preferences towards poetry, makes me think of Russel Edson, who wrote that a prose poem is a “cast-iron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because its pilot does not care if it does or not. Nevertheless, this heavier-than-air prose monstrosity, this cast-iron toy will be seen to be floating over the trees.”

And finally, I love it because it’s one of my favorite kinds of descriptions – it gets to what it wants by saying what it’s not. This is the essence of the prose poem. If you like existing beyond the frame of the photograph, or being a part of the blurry background, you might like the prose poem. If you think of yourself as a spy in a world that wants you to fit into its holes, you might like the prose poem. If you’re comfortable frustrating people in your lack of congruity, in your ambiguities, and how no one can really say what you are, then you might like prose poems. And regardless of where you fall in this spectrum, I am fairly certain you will enjoy the prose poems in this issue of Hole in the Head Review. They offer a lot of freedom*.

Nameless things disappear in Jeff Friedman’s poem “No One Left to Cry,” and by the time you realize you don’t know what they are, they’re gone. The mystery continues in Harrison Fisher’s “The Dyer’s Hand” – who dyes what and what are they doing? I’m in it for the blue-hued ambiance. We hit the road in Patrick Cahill’s “Joy Ride,” and while there’s joy, there’s a lot of other surprising things at play here too; I was reminded of how Siken talked about the leaps between sentences. Jill Bronfman’s “Ristorante Cinghiale” is a cinematic and culinary-rich depiction of every point of view surrounding a meat-laden pizza, including a graceful and noble boar. Things get much airy-er, dreamier, and ghostlier in Giles Goodland’s atmospheric and haunting “Naming.” And finally, Nicole Antillon examines time from an architectural point of view in “Some Timelines Last” by doing some terrifyingly apt wondering: “I wonder when beauty turned into an upgrade.” I often wonder that too. I hope you find beauty in these prose poems.

* Hmmm…I do quite dislike that word “freedom.” But I’m using it because I would like to try to make an

effort to reclaim it. The word needs some help. Especially because Johan Sebastián Guerrero died recently in Maine because of his search for freedom, or more exactly, because hateful and deadly misogynists are allowed to wield freedom through car windows at traffic stops. And it feels impossible at this moment in mid-July 2026 to not mention the importance of this.

Not Like Flying

It never really feels like flying,

though this is a thing we like to say

about it and I was sent flying once

by the driver of a green SUV

who failed to heed a stop sign

at a clearly marked intersection

where I had right of way.

We don’t ride like the wind

either, though I remember

one very windy day riding

on a wide road by the lake,

cherry trees in effulgent bloom

and me pedaling amid a riot

of pink petals like a character

in one of those French musicals

from the 1960s where the shopgirl

and her lover reunite in the final reel

and I was the wind and the petals

and the shopgirl and the lover

and the sun flashing off the water.

No. It’s the tug of Earth’s core.

The wheel of objects in space

and time. Mass and distance

interacting with the flex and strain

of ligament and tendon; hamstring,

glute, and calf. The heart. The heart

most of all. Just as you crest the long hill

and right before you start the steep descent,

there’s a moment when gravity and exertion

are in equilibrium and it all falls away—

the clamoring voices, the night sweats,

the vertigo. That’s when you feel it.

Silence not words. The dark spaces

within. That’s when you know

there’s a center, still,

to everything

after all.

Todd Campbell is a speechwriter, poet, and mosaic artist based in Seattle where he has lived for the past three decades. His poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, Poet Lore, Reed Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Watershed, and elsewhere. Instagram: @camptoddbell; toddcampbellpoetry.com