These poems are from students in the Advanced Poetry Workshop at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, during Spring 2023, with Cheryl Clark. Together we made our way through another semester in the midst of the waning COVID-19 global pandemic.

Thinking about the journal title Texture, I share a passage from the poet Don Paterson:

“Poetry is a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world, that is to say that it aims to make the texture of our perception malleable. It does so by surreptitious and devious means, by seeding and planting things in the memory and imagination of the reader with such force and insidious originality that they cannot be deprogrammed. What you remember changes how you think.”