SPRING 2024

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Cover art: Jacquelyn Strycker, Springtime

In this Issue

Welcome to the first all-poetry issue of The Westchester Review! When this fell into our laps, we’d already begun to fill spring 2024 and had a portal full of possibilities. This gave us an opportunity to expand the number of poets from our usual 14 to 20 and add two featured poets, Iain Haley Pollock and Sumita Chakraborty, in interviews and with selected poems. The in-depth interviews were conducted by our poetry readers Michael Quattrone and Jay Ward, whose compelling questions elicited thoughtful responses on process and revision.

While we didn’t intend to curate a themed issue, threads emerged from the poems we selected. As we edit and get ready for any issue’s release, we notice connections, relationships, and correlations linking what we have chosen for publication to create a unique poetic conversation. The Spring 2024 poems observe nature, institutions, art, artists, work, and places, drawing from experience and imagination.

Four poets, Ace Boggess, Brent Amenreyo, Henry Mills, and James Reidel, use aspects of construction, building, and carpentry in varied forms and perspectives, using language that is humorous, sensual, and philosophical.

Poets have mined their lives and come up with gold—or even the color yellow, which we noticed popping up in poems by Janée J. Baugher, Babo Kamel, Susan Barry-Schulz, and Michael T. Young.

We have a poet who writes about imprisonment, one who is confined by a limited future and a fear of falling by the wayside, one who extols the virtues of a polyester shirt, and another who excavates the contents of a CARE package.

There are more poems that explore the personal and the universal, and we hope that you will share your favorites in conversations and on social media platforms.