集美麻豆 Poetry Review
No. 51, Winter 2026
Editor’s Note
Ten years ago, for the 2016 issue, HSPR did an issue of all sonnets, composed for the magazine, on specific themes (silence, frames, container, water, a walk). The issue was graced with an image from one of my oldest friends, artist and filmmaker Benjamin Tiven, and was meant to celebrate the pleasure of writing poetry. The poems were all written in two hours or less, mimicking the ‘contests’ sometimes held by Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt. What emerged was a wonderful collection of both poems and approaches to the sonnet form. It was also just, almost more than anything else, a lot of fun to make and to read.
So for this year’s issue, ten years after that first collection of sonnets, we’re trying it again. Same idea, really—the poets in this issue were given a choice of themes and a time-frame of two hours to compose their poems. Another old friend (artist Jennifer Caine) lent us an amazing painting for the cover. This year’s themes were borrowed from famous sonnets: moth (from Frost’s “Design”), deer (from Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt…”), hands (from Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays), mirror (from Bishop’s “Sonnet”), and honey (from Brooks’s “Gay Chaps at the Bar”). Many of the poets from 2016 reappear in this 2026 edition, but they are of course also joined by lots of new voices willing to play along. In fact, a number of writers found the prompt prompting more than one effort, so we’re excited to run, alongside what I might call the “main selection,” a section of B-sides, if you will, that are taking the place of our usual 4x4 section. These extra sonnets are not organized by theme, so I’ll let the reader decide which themes have inspired the poems.
Editor, Nathaniel Perry
Student Editors, Ashby Bonin, Jameson Smith, Landon May
Contributing Editor, Nicholas D. Nace