From the Editors
I greatly enjoyed digging into the slush and finding this month’s assortment of poems for you.
From the lead off poem, where we imagine the horrors that wait when you probe the unknown, I
found all kinds of poems with themes related to the body. Appropriate for the month that gives us
Halloween. It wasn’t only the concrete body part poems that engaged me, but also those poems
that probed a bit deeper, that wanted us to look at the layers underneath the surface. These are
some of my favorite types of poems, those that explore the unknown inside us. There were also
several poems that probed the intricacies of place, how a location gets inside you, takes hold, and
just won’t let go. It’s always interesting when poems in an issue begin to theme themselves along
certain lines. Is it the collective unconscious at work? Or something more mundane? I believe in
the collective, and having been working on a certain type of poem; I’m eager to see if the subject
I’m working on appears in the slush pile like wisps over the water. So sit back and enjoy this
quarter’s collection of disturbing, decorous and downright delightful poems. We certainly did.
- Constance Brewer, Editor
As I sent out the PDF of our fall issue to authors for one last look before the issue went live, I
thought about what an amazing collection of poets we have working with us. From the
beginning, Gyroscope Review has been fortunate to receive submissions from poets who take
their work seriously, who craft each line into a work of art. The words that spill across these
pages, while specific and alive all on their own, allow our readers to form their own images in
their heads. The words are what matter around here and that is why our pages hold nothing more
- and nothing less - than the poems themselves. Artwork is what we save for covers because the
poems are enough. They are the dialogue that engages our readers and, hopefully, spreads into a
larger community. In this issue, while we did not set out to invite Halloween-themed poems, we
did get some clearly creepy submissions and noticed several body parts as major players: heart,
hair, teeth, hands, and even the lowly appendix. Our first hendecasyllabic sonnet showed up and
we were impressed. Poets wrote about plane crashes, wind, rain, music, ghosts. They twisted
fairy tales into social commentary, took a few jabs at mythical figures. They took refuge in wild
places and drove with the windows down. And we read every single piece with the eagerness of
someone who has stumbled upon the mother lode of verse. We hope you have as many swirling
images after you read this issue of Gyroscope Review as you can handle. We don’t want to lose
you to Netflix, after all.
- Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, Editor
Gyroscope Review i!