We kick off our second year of issues at ballast with deep gratitude for the year that was and the contributors, supporters, and readers who’ve stopped by along the way. We’re immensely proud of what ballast has been and will continue to become, all undergirded by a gleeful abandon to exuberance, a thirst for potentiality unfolding into a reality so badly in need. If I’m coming off as rather mawkish here, please don’t hold it against me with too much resentment: I write this editorial while my newborn dozes against my chest a little after one of these early January midnights. This little one is my fourth son and our last, so I’m attending to the details and working exceedingly hard to memorize what’s easily forgotten—the gentle snoring, the squeaks, the stretches, the smiles that aren’t yet actual smiles. It seems, in this season at least, as if holding on and taking care like this is one of those grand and pressing responsibilities as can come.

If you’ve glossed our website or have followed us for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with our ongoing mission to promote more and more and more poetry. It’s no coincidence, then, that we fill our issues until teeming—thanks in large part, of course, to our contributors who trust us to house their poems. We’ve had the good fortune in our first year to publish an eye-popping (at least in my opinion) 120 writers and artists across our first four issues. Among this cohort are emerging poets and state poet laureates, students and professors, mixed-media artists and multi-collection authors.

We gladly follow this precedent into ballast year two. In this issue, you’ll encounter the lyrical snapshots of the quotidian alongside the political and allegorical jeremiads that speak to and of the strife of a U.S. election year and ongoing wars abroad. We have short poems. And we have long poems. We have poems that defy categorization and expectation. We have a substantial review that inspects the last works of both a divisive critical giant and a masterful prose stylist. We have artwork that brushes against language—or perhaps uses language as one of its brushstrokes. There are translations, formal innovations, and formal iconoclasms. There are historical renderings of childhood memories, of national figures (including at least one prominent fall from grace), and even of sweet treats like licorice and Double Stuf Oreos.

Speaking of sweet treats, I’ve been savoring Jelly Bellies. You know, those jelly beans with a wide assortment of flavors. “Gourmet,” the company even calls it. Well, during one of our recent editorial meetings, Sara and I were discussing the grab-bag approach of putting our issues together and relished in the alchemical process of it all. It was then that I mused on Jelly Bellies as something like an analogy for the journal. It felt fitting. It felt right. Cute, sure, but apt.

Which is why I particularly welcome the flavor mixing that I’ve come to see in each of our issues past, present, and future. Certainly, there’s real pleasure in coming across one poem you may have come across online, just as there is in eating a single one of those candy beans. (I’m partial to the “Juicy Pear” flavor myself.) But so too is there an abandon—gleeful, reckless, off-putting, or otherwise—in mixing flavors or even in taking a whole mouthful. Poems next to poems. Style mixed with style. Aesthetics and politics and escapes. I mean, c’mon. How good is that? And so I’ll keep championing “more and more and more.” So whether you’re a contributor or a reader, a long-time fan or first-time visitor, thanks for adding to our mix. We hope you’re better off for it. We know that ballast is.

—   Jacob Schepers, for ballast