From the Editor
Dear Reader,
I can’t get into end-of-the-year wrap-ups. I just don’t care which songs I listened to the most on Spotify or how many books my friend read in 2025. I have little faith in metrics, and I’d rather look forward than backward.
Yet sometimes you need to look backward to move forward. Bracken has been around for ten years now, and our magazine is maturing. We recently joined the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and we’ll be at AWP in Baltimore in March. So I’ve been crafting mission statements and profiles, which means taking stock of things and asking: who have we reached?
In the past year, Bracken had 41,000 page views, and we experienced a peak of 1,700 unique visitors in October 2025. Not bad for an all-volunteer journal of poetry and art with no external funding or institutional support. (Even if I’m not into metrics, I still like a good number now and then!) Seventy percent of our site visits were from the United States, with the remaining thirty percent spread over ninety-eight countries. After the US, the ten most frequent locations of our readers were the UK, China, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Russia, Germany, India, Nigeria, and France.
But, beyond the numbers, any effort to reach new readers involves asking some very basic questions: What is Bracken? What is it for? Who is it for? And why should anyone care?
We’re a small magazine, but these are big questions. Humans have always cared about poetry and art because they show us something about ourselves that we cannot perceive or understand in any other way. Today, we struggle to get our bearings, and the notion of truth feels fractured. But the truth of poetry remains.
In this issue of Bracken, the speaker of Hayden Saunier’s poem “I Was the House” tells us:
I was post and beam, mortise and tenon,
tongue and groove.
I was the whole construction built on friction’s bite.
All night, I knocked and shook against my sides.
I had never thought of comparing a person to a house in a storm before, yet reading this poem I am utterly convinced—I feel it in my bones—that I am this house. What else am I? What else can I be? Leusa Lloyd declares “I am oyster,” and I’m there with her in this most physical, beautiful, painful embodiment. Metaphor—the “carrying over” that is such a big part of poetry—makes meaning in ways that can be all the stronger when we do not expect them. And these experiences—in some unquantifiable way—change us.
Poetry can also confront us with the world’s cruelty. In her poem “Nightshade,” Diana Whitney warns that “No one // walks out of a fairytale unscathed.” We don’t always find mercy. There is none in Pam Crow’s “Military Cemetery,” where her father’s tombstone is “identical to hundreds growing // like bleached teeth from the buzz-cut grass.”
But, sometimes, we do find mercy. Encountering a buck, following a doe. Watching a Baltimore oriole that has survived a harsh winter. Letting a desire to flee, to “unbutton this body, / peel it like the soft rind of an udara fruit,” yield to a desire of becoming.
When we feel the world descending into madness all around us, poetry is always there—not as an escape, but as a deepening of our understanding of what this human life is all about. We can plunge into it, a hot spring below a cold stone ledge.
Kate Deimling