Editor’s Note

Don’t expect this slim summer issue to be a picnic. Delicious, yes, but full of pain and frustration. Pain like fireworks, yes, beauty that erupts and dazzles. Sometimes that’s all there is to eat; sometimes the sky is on fire. Even in these times, perhaps especially, poetry remains potent. Our need to express, to erupt and dazzle, remains delicious.

In this issue we celebrate the winners of our first contest, the Lucy Terry Prince Prize for rural poets of color. Named for the first known African-American poet in English literature—a free, landowning woman in colonial Vermont—the prize is a reclamation of our untold histories, an affirmation that rural voices have always been and can always be proudly Black and brown. Celebrated Vermont poet Major Jackson served as the prize’s inaugural judge, and he chose three poems that dance and reckon with pain, history, pleasure: a round of would you rather between the living and the dead; the secret heart of a best man’s speech; a pantoum in the rhythm of modern child labor on Ivory Coast cocoa farms. Read our original announcement of the prize winners and finalists on our blog.

Submissions are open for our autumn issue. To make up for the lack of two missed issues due to the pandemic, we’ve made this issue, No. 5, available for free on our website. If you are able to make a tax-deductible donation to Mount Island at this time, your support would mean very much to us and the writers we publish. Learn how to donate on our website.

—Desmond Peeples