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.