Frozen Fire
Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
We are releasing this issue of Vita Poetica, our first of 2026, at the end of a week when treacherous cold weather spread across the United States. Its path left some 100 million Americans in its wake, with millions waking up to cracking, iced-over tree limbs in their yards, and with thousands still with no electrical power, days later.
In the Washington, DC, area where many of us Vita Poetica editorial folks live, we saw what initially appeared to be an underwhelming five to seven inches of snow become nearly a foot or more of precipitation with the addition of some three inches of sleet. It also happened to be the longest spell of continuous cold for the past 150 years, and in a temperature range that hovered between eight to 20 degrees, the sleet hardened into a smooth, almost impermeable shell.
“Immobility” might seem to be a pretty salient concept for many of us right now–amid what is now seemingly everpresent authoritarian political oppression and cultural struggle, we can feel as frozen in our moral senses and in our abilities to act.
But though it took some unexpected effort, when I went outside (at last) to the walk, I found that, once struck hard enough, the seemingly impenetrable ice cracked like a gunshot, and the fluffy snow nearly bubbled up from underneath–a kind of frozen fire, indeed.
In a multiplicity of ways, the works of art in this issue show that we are not, in fact, powerless. In so many instances, the narrators and governing souls that guide our selections explode out of their immobilities.
For example, our visual artist Jocelyn Mathewes’ Never the Same Again uses the pieces of broken Slinky® toys, along with the random detritus of medical supplies, to build sculptures exploring the limitations of disability and illness–as well as the opportunities that extend beyond it.
“[O]nce you bend or distort a Slinky,” Mathewes explains in the note accompanying the piece, “it never moves quite the same way it used to,” and is often discarded. Mathewes shows how the pieces of maimed Slinky hold the memories of their previous roles, but also possess entirely new forms and capacities. They are not merely acts of recovery, but assertions of vitality and strength.
The theme of breaking beyond limitations and boundaries to fruitful ends can also be metaphorical. In Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo’s review of Chine McDonald’s Unmaking Mary: Shattering the Myth of Perfect Motherhood, she explores McDonald’s effort to assess the Virgin Mary beyond certain stereotypes of static devotional piety and motherhood that McDonald ascribes to patriarchy. McDonald’s goal is to re-render Mary in terms of her agency: “[L]like any mother, not only was she shaped by her knowledge of him, but she too shaped him.” (Emphasis mine.)
And there’s more: Richard Jackson’s “The Centurion’s Report” is that rare poem that takes a Biblical narrative on faith and shows–in unexpected, slantwise ways–how the God-Man literally ends up enabling the soldier to cast off his armor. Buddhist teacher/writer K. D. Battle’s nonfiction piece “In Defense of Bad Meditation” shows how the moment of transformation can be taking place–even when it seems entirely otherwise.
“Change is God,” Afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler observed, and although I think I view this differently than she did, I certainly can make that case. And change takes place at Vita Poetica, too: We are delighted to announce the arrival of Lynn Domina and Christopher Honey to our pages as poetry editor and interviews editor, respectively. We are excited to welcome them and look forward to moving with vigor through this year in their company.
