A Note From the Editors

This issue of New Verse Review includes alumni of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, which graduated its first cohort of poetry students in 2023. Under the program’s founding director, James Matthew Wilson, students studied the craft of poetry, submitted and critiqued poems in workshops, and learned the art of writing in verse from masters of the tradition both ancient and modern.

We did all of this on Zoom. Or, rather, it began in our Zoom classes and then continued during the annual residency at the University of St. Thomas’s campus in the sweltering and humid Houston summers. What has formed as a result of this united study and creative undertaking is a true community, striving together to create something good. Some of the first fruits of that effort have been collected here in this special issue of New Verse Review.

This collection spans a variety of forms, verses, and themes, showcasing the diversity of voices and styles within our community, as well as the unifying spirit of our art. Readers will find a multitude of sonnets – Petrarchan, curtal, and nonce – as well as a ballade about ballet, a villanelle, rhyming couplets, quatrains, sestains, and tercets, metrical verse, alliterative verse, blank verse, and free verse. Each poem has been crafted, the way a carpenter builds a chair, or the way an architect plans a building. These poems do something and they are something.

We have organized the poems first by theme, then by poet. Several poems meditate on art and beauty – on what it means to be an artist. Others deal with death, burial, or aging. Still others contemplate nature or the nuances of family life and friendship. There are poems of light verse and religious verse. We have also chosen the collection’s “bookends” to be poems about writing. Emma Atkinson’s poem “Ephesians 2:10” begins the issue with the line, “You have called me your poem, and so I am.” We felt this a fitting way to begin a special issue showcasing a community of poets from the only MFA program “committed expressly to a renewal of the craft of literature within the cosmic scope, long memory, and expansive vision of the Catholic literary and intellectual tradition.” We conclude the issue with D.A. Cooper’s “To Read,” which has at its last line: “[...] I will find the time I need to read.” To us, this is a hopeful and fitting ending. There is so much good poetry being written and waiting to be read. We suggest starting with the poems here.

We want to thank Steve Knepper for offering us the opportunity to guest-edit this issue. We also thank James Matthew Wilson and the other members of the poetry faculty at the University of St. Thomas for their instruction and encouragement. Finally, we are pleased to say that both of us will continue serving New Verse Review as associate editors, beginning with the Summer 2025 issue.

Sincerely,

D.A. Cooper ‘24 and Mary Grace Mangano ‘23