[ Preface ]

“The book,” Edmond Jabès writes, “multiplies the book.” The book makes a world, multiplies its meaning in how it populates that world. The book multiplies. It is more than itself: the book is the past books from which it is born, the future books it informs, the present books it lives beside and with which it resonates.

The present issue features the finalists of Interim’s 2020 Test Site Poetry Prize and includes the two manuscripts that will appear as books: Katherine Factor’s A Sybil Society, winner of the 2020 Test Site Poetry Prize, and Stephanie Berger’s Femme D’Interieur, winner of the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Prize in Poetry.

This year marks the third of Interim’s book contest. In all three years, Interim’s Editor Claudia Keelan and I have been impressed at how many vibrant manuscripts have come to us, how many pages we would love to have in the hands of readers.

The poems of the present issue speak to one another. They are the voices of the contemporary poetic conversation, born from the poets of the past, and multiplying the conversation into the language of the future.

–Andrew S. Nicholson, Associate Editor