Featured Title & Author

Night Swim

In Night Swim, Joan Kwon Glass navigates the dark sea of mourning after losing her sister and her 11-year old nephew to suicide within a two month span of time. Night Swim does not turn away from the ugly, unreconciled side of grief: the recurring nightmares, life with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, questions that will never have answers, the desire to hold someone responsible for the deaths when there is no one left to blame. The collection begins with a solitary, titular poem which asks the reader to consider what grief feels like when "the landscape doesn’t change // but everything else does."

In this testimony of mourning and memory, the author weaves a suicide survivorship narrative told through the five stages of grief. This narrative includes the author’s memories of the weeks leading up to the deaths, her regrets, scenes from the funerals, erasures from police reports, and the excruciating forging ahead with daily life in spite of deep sorrow, maddening questions, and all that remains unresolved. It gives survivors permission to find their way through on their own terms: to hold a grudge against the dead while also wishing desperately for them to still be alive, to consider taking every door in your house off its hinges just to make more room for ghosts, to measure time by the ages the dead would have been if they were still here. Night Swim suggests that in order to live bravely again in a world without one’s beloved, the survivor may eschew the expectations of “appropriate” grief and tell the truth as it exists for them. What should we hold onto and what should we let go of? Although Night Swim shares a story of extraordinary loss, it is also a testament to how even against the harshest currents, in the darkest waters, we can swim up and through, where light and the shore will be waiting.

Joan Kwon Glass

Joan Kwon Glass' first full-length poetry collection, Night Swim, won the 2021 Diode Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) & If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). In 2021 she was a Runner-Up for the Sundress Publications Chapbook Contest, a finalist for the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize, the Subnivean Award & the Lumiere Review Writing Contest. Joan is a graduate of Smith College & serves as Poet Laureate for the city of Milford, CT & as Poetry Co-Editor for West Trestle Review. She has spent the past 20 years as an educator in the Connecticut public schools. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Diode, The Rupture, Nelle, Rattle, Pirene’s Fountain, SWWIM, Dialogist, South Florida Poetry Journal, Honey Literary, Mom Egg, Rust & Moth, Lantern Review & many others. Joan has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net. She tweets @joanpglass & you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.

Featured Poem

Firing Squad

from Diode Poetry Journal 14.2

In our line of work,
three men must fire,
because we have three

women to go home to,
three bedstands with lamps,
three shaving mirrors,

and three straight razors
to convince it was
another man’s bullet

that hit its mark.

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen's most recent poetry collection is Everything (Four Way Books, 2021.) She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More poems, etc.: andreacohen.org

Featured Organization

Black Artists + Designers Guild

"BADG is building a more equitable and inclusive creative culture by advancing a community of independent Black artists, makers and designers in creative industries. We are committed to honoring our ancestral legacy in design, by taking ownership of our narrative, and by creating spaces to celebrate Black excellence and culture in design."

Diode Editions has been fortunate to be able to donate to BADG and we hope that you might consider donating as well, if able.