I’m writing this in November 2023, one month after Israeli president Netanyahu declared war on Hamas and began airstrikes against targets in Gaza. During the weeks we were in production for this issue, it was difficult to think of anything but the pictures, the headlines, the news footage coming from the region. Since Netanyahu’s declaration, more than ten thousand Palestinians have been killed. On October 25, a mass shooting in Maine left 18 people dead and 13 others injured. These events are not equivalent or analogous, but they weave a kind of grief-tapestry that feels draped over these days, a heavy blanket that some days it feels impossible to crawl out from under. On social media, many people share poems; others share their frustrations and feelings that poetry, that art, is insufficient, even insulting. 

Doing the work of selecting, editing, and putting these pieces together in an issue reminds me of two things I believe art does have the power to do. One is to bring us back to the human, to bring us back to the singular voice of the maker, the insistence of speech against silence, the refusal to be dehumanized. Violence requires dehumanization and erasure of the particular—art resists both. This resistance is the very thing that also brings solace. Why, when I’m sad, can I be so comforted by, say, a woman’s poetry reaching forward from the past, writing about her own particular sadnesses that took place on the other side of the world? This is the specificity paradox: the more art depicts the specific circumstances and context of its maker, the more connection is possible. Abstractions and statistics resolve into individual human stories, the face of a man, a woman, a child.

For this issue of Bluestem, I knew the moment I saw Chicago artist Laura Kina’s painting “Over the Rainbow, One More Time” that I wanted to request to use it as our cover art. Painted in the aftermath of cancer, Covid and the end of her marriage, Kina’s painting captures, as the painter herself put it, “grief and life in the after.” In the painting, we see feet extending out in a reclining position; out a large window the sun is rising, hitting a disk on the windowsill that refracts the light sharply, slicing it in a pink line out across the room. The perspective from prone in bed, the wan feet, tell me everything about the subject’s illness, her fatigue, her grief. What I especially love about Kina’s paintings is that it rejects platitudes—it’s always darkest before the dawn; the sun will come out tomorrow. Not all of us on earth today will be on earth tomorrow, and Kina’s art reflects the urgency of life as the pink beam of light pierces the room like a laser beam. In this issue of Bluestem, we have made room for the heaviness of grief and also for the moments of radiance that cut through. We hope it brings some solace.

-Colleen Abel