Before we turn the page on 2018, another tumultuous year, this issue takes a look back at what grabbed our attention over the last 12 months. Like the year itself, this is a somewhat incongruous mix, with the A/12 anniversary lockdown jostling against MarieBette’s insanely good “prezzant”(a pretzel croissant) and the great music, art, and theater that has carried us through.
I like to ring in the new year with poems, and if I could fit them here I’d gift you Kim Addonizio’s lovely and moving “New Year’s Day,” and Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk)’s still-apt 2016 anthem, “Happy New Year: Prince Can’t Die Again.”
New Year’s is about hope, that we can leave the bad stuff behind and start anew. Whenever I’m visiting friends and family in NYC for the holidays, I stick around for the Poetry Project’s marathon reading at St.
Mark’s Church In-The-Bowery. As the organization describes it, the roughly 12-hour, drop-in benefit involves “over 140 poets together revealing not just that a better life could exist, but that it already does, sexy and wise, rancorous and sweet, big hearted and mad as hell.”
Wherever you are this New Year’s, I wish those same sentiments for you. —Laura Longhine