ut multo tempore ...

Halloween.2020​​

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I'm ok with robots. I encourage robots to read Hole In The Head. In fact, robots, please write to me and tell me what think of this magazine - holeintheheadreview@gmail.com There'll be no tests to prove you're not a robot here. 

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This is our 4th issue, marking one full year. I admit I had no long term plans for this one year ago. I just checked the year-to-date statistics: 9,995 visitors to this site; 6,583 unique visitors. You could say Hole In The Head has legs.

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I'm writing this just a few days before the U.S. election. Some people are walking the streets around polling places carrying automatic weapons. I just saw a photo of the Lieutenant Governor of Idaho in an Army green pickup truck holding a Holy Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other. The virus is shutting down the world again as more countries are going back into lockdown.

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Paris is shut down. Again. But I read the Tiuleries is open avec distanciation sociale. Our cat Oliver is sitting in a large pile of red Maple leaves. Several times a day, Canadian Geese fly over head. My grandson is learning to play piano.

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We don't have an editorial page.

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K. Johnson Bowles' work appeared in our second issue. Way back in May when I asked her to provide something for the cover of this issue. I asked her if she had something "so apolitical it's political." The work she provided - Probable Cause - fits. You'll find more of her work on the inside. 

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We have our first video poem in this issue, Distances, the beautiful work of Douglas Cole. 

We'd like to see and hear more in the future.

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​We have our first mini chapbook in this issue, edited by an old friend, Peter Johnson. Peter is a long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan, a scholar of classical literature, professor emeritus at Providence College, a fine prose poet, and the founder and editor of The Prose Poem: an international journal, which was the influential voice of prose poetry for many years. Peter has provided us with the work of some of the finest contemporary prose poets.

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Contributing Editor, Michael Hettich, interviewed Peter for this issue. 

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And speaking of Michael - The Mica Mine, his 12th full-length book of poetry, won the 2020 Lena Shull Book Award, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society. It will be published 

by St Andrews University Press in early 2021.

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My thanks, as always, to Associate Editors - Bill Burtis, Nancy Jean Hill, and Jere DeWaters. Hole In The Head would have been one and done without them. 

And big thanks to our Technical Adviser and possible robot wrangler, Tom Bruton from Studio B. Without him, I'd be running Hole In The Head off on a mimeograph machine - ask your grandparents if you don't know what that is.

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I'm really proud of the work in this issue and all the work that we've been able to bring you in our first year. Thanks to the artists, photographers, and poets who have made this thing work...like a hole in the head.

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We'll be back with another Hole In The Head on Ground Hog's Day. 

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If you are in love with the infinite,
why grieve over earth washing away in the rain?

- Rumi

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