Editorial

We’ve been asked a few times why we wanted to do an issue on sex and relationships.

There are many reasons. One of them is a family Christmas card trend in the US, which first went viral in 2021, and now reappears wearyingly every December. In the portraits, a mother and her daughters are restrained with strings of fairy lights with mouths taped shut, while fathers and sons smile and hold up signs that read, “Finally, peace on earth!”

For several nights, I fixated on those postcards, and what I found the most disturbing. It’s not just the silencing of women. It’s how the language of the joke is supposed to blind us to the sexualised context, and the frequency of sexual and domestic abuse. They make me think of the dead, partially-clothed-female-in-cop-drama trope, where we can cloak our voyeurism or sexual gratification behind shock and outrage at the crime. Is there a more dangerous fetish than one that is not understood as a fetish?

There is work to be done. Some of it must happen in language. Some of it must interrogate what we mean by sex and how we relate to each other. We all have the right to love, to express desire, to connect with who we love. And yet, many of us, most of the contributors to this issue in fact, will be all too familiar with the accommodations we have to make to do so safely because of our race, gender or sexuality.

We also wanted to ask a question of poetry right now. We were curious about how poets were approaching sex and intimacy as a subject matter. There is so little skin in most major poetry magazines, it’s hard to tell. And sometimes, what’s outside of that is played so hard for laughs or titillation or shock, it’s hard to take the meaning from it, however skilfully it is done. Why not be serious.

All of these poems are serious. That is not to say there is no lightness, or comedy. But there is also vulnerability, honesty, tenderness and pleasure. There are poems about falling in love with plants, poems about violence, poems about how we hold onto ourselves when falling in love. There is sex and desire. Good sex, ferocious desire, awkward sex, drug-fuelled sex. There is loss. And going back to what is elided in those dreadful postcards, there is context. Love and the construction of sexual identity is perhaps a kind of labour, and something that often takes place within the framework of domestic labour.

We wanted to know what happens to form when people write about sex and intimacy. Touch is often grounding, but for there to be touch, there must be something to hold onto. Many of these poems make unpredictable but very deliberate choices in line length, or where they break their lines, as if the speaker were always questioning where they were – in relation to the subject matter, or the white space perhaps, or in relationship to someone else.

Finally, we also wanted to think about the connection between sexual expression and creative expression. My instinct is that these things have always been neighbourly. Lit cottages side by side in the brain, as described in Glyn Maxwell’s essay, head-rushing dwellings where we explore either fantasy or narrative or both.

All of the work we’ve selected has a deep authenticity. These are poems that have been lived in, by writers who combine self-knowledge and curiosity with craft. We hope you see them as we do, as an antidote to the paucity of the public conversation about sex. Above all, we hope you find poems that move you, and perhaps ground you with their touch for a while.

Sarah Gibbons | Co-Editor