Editor's Note
This year, we asked for work that is true to itself. Regardless of subject matter, we wanted to feel something authentic by the time we finished a piece. So we sought out the bizarre, the beautiful, the understated, the unreachable, and the new. And we found it.
It lives in the corners of Kirby Wilson’s ladybug-infested spaceship. It churns beneath the waters of Grace Gilbert’s aubade, in the simplicity of lines like “once for the body / bore through / with brine.” It is the fifteen year process that went into Patrizia Pedraza’s The image of failure ii and the surprising allegory that we found in the baby chimpanzee in Tim Fitts’ aptly titled short story. It is our hope that you will flip through the pages of this magazine, find something that you were not expecting to see, and allow that detour from routine to alter your day and quite possibly your entire life.
On the one hand, it seems to me that writers and artists are much like alchemists, able to create gold out of nothing. But four years with The Penn Review has taught me that there is something much greater than the mere individual that calls to so many people from so many different walks of life. Whatever it is, I am grateful it exists, because it allows literary arts communities like ours to survive even in the middle of a global pandemic. And for sustaining it, dear reader, we thank you.