There is something special about a journal that takes as much care with its physical production as with the literature and art within it. It's an honor and thrill to be in this issue of Northwest Review, the last under the editorship of Natalie Staples and S. Tremaine Nelson. Steve Nelson's kind notes on rejections from the Paris Review years ago were massively important to my confidence as a writer, and when I heard he had left that journal to revive Northwest Review I got a submission together posthaste. I'm so happy this poem—a dear one to me, which marks the moment in my book To Leave for Our Own Country that my wife's pregnancy is revealed—has found such a wonderful second home in these pages.
