Reading the entries for this issue, roughly half for the mental health contest and half for this issue’s theme of Hope, followed shortly by the emergence of the COVID-19 virus, might seem to some a daunting challenge. As always, the rewards of hearing so many authentic voices more than compensated. At some point, though, I did find myself thinking of Shakespeare’s King Lear—enduring the battering wind and cold rain of a raging storm as he cries out to the heavens to spare his sanity but, in the end, finding peace in the “milk of human kindness” exhibited by his loyal and forgiving daughter Cordelia. Shakespeare’s greatness, in part, lies with his ability to present with an unflinching eye human frailty and balance it with the redeeming power of our caring for one another. Now, more than ever, compassion and reaching out to those most in need should be priorities.

So many of the poems here are humanistic at their core, showing us how urgently we need, and respond to, the attention and care of others—whether it comes in a yoga class at a cancer center, at a hospital providing a bone marrow transplant, in a speech therapist’s or counselor’s office—or in the memory of a mother’s kitchen. Be comforted by all these poems—those that recreate the balm of family connections, nuclear or extended, in works by Seth Grindstaff, Ellen Stone, LindaAnn Loshiavo, James Littwin, and Preeti Shah; as well as by those that remind us of the wisdom and courage to be mined from many cultures, from history, from mythology, represented in poems by Vincent Casaregola, Wilda Morris, Aubrey Zahn (our contest winner), Laurinda Lind, and Mia Wright, whose use of magic realism dramatizes both the heightened danger to black women in childbirth and the power of unified resistance to ignorance and racism where and however manifested.

Finally, this month we’re including visual and concrete poems for the first time: contest runner-up Shay Alexi’s poem shows us what it’s like to suffer from OCD, and J.I. Kleinberg praises “chapel of metaphor . . . cathedral of books,” and the emotionally reassuring “structure” to be found in thought shaped by artistic language and form. As you read this, there’s a good chance that the sun, whose retreat I lamented in my letter for our winter issue, is now shining in a blue sky. Or, it might just be the warmth of the poetic imagination—always a source of strength, no matter what dark challenge we may face.

Steve Granzyk is the poetry editor of Please See Me.