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.