As I sat down to write this introduction, I received an email about a poetry exchange. The idea was to forge a collective act of resistance, while uplifting ourselves and each other through the “beauty” of poetry. But beauty isn’t what comes to mind when I think of activism, and I found myself puzzling over this juxtaposition of resistance with something that seems vaguely indulgent. While I recognize that it would be impossible to persevere, let alone resist, in a world altogether devoid of beauty, it occurred to me that beauty operates in these contexts not simply to bolster our resolve, but more fundamentally as a way to get us to notice. This line of thinking brought to mind Adrienne Rich, whose poems were both exquisite and unabashedly political. In particular, I am thinking of Rich’s 1991 poem, “What Kind of Times Are These,” in which the poet draws our attention to matters of political urgency by invoking images from the natural world, because, as she writes, “. . . in times like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.” It’s a darkly ironic poem, one that seems to undermine the poetic enterprise itself. But perhaps there is a more generous reading, according to which Rich is simply pointing to the ways in which poetry fosters attentiveness and the capacity for noticing itself.

Mantis 18 may be our most ambitious issue to date, encompassing, in addition to new poetry and translations, staples of this publication since its inception nearly two decades ago, a selection of West Coast poems, Amherst poems, and a selection of poems and prose works that reflect on the theme of the Embodied Mind. I am struck by the sheer array of poetic possibilities represented in this issue, in poems informed as much by exigency as aesthetics. In their evocation of themes as diverse as the city and the human mind, and in forms that range from the strictly metrical to the highly experimental, the poems assembled in this issue are a testament to the variability of poetry itself, what it can be, and achieve, and how it continues to be as relevant and necessary as ever.

Our selection of new poems reveals that the natural world remains among the most fundamental sources of inspiration for the poet, while also demonstrating an abiding concern with the power of language to make legible matters both abstract and concrete. From an “inert earth / tickled/ by tentative / fngertips” (Scharhag), to a wasp’s “scissorlike wings intact, / hunkered in the sun” (J.T. Robinson), these poems draw our attention to the beauty of the everyday. Seen in this light, one’s nose becomes one’s very own “. . . pink piece / of Mt. Rushmore” (Walker), while a “rustle in the thistle” compels “an ear to make out / in sound the shape, / form of another’s foot / feather, or scale” (Alford). At times, nature emerges in the most unlikely of places, as a metaphor, perhaps, or a dream: “the flowers in the bathtub the trees / on the subway a lush garden in a pocket riot police / in the woods” (Vermeulen). At others, it surfaces as a shared point of reference for the evocation of something else, like the “metal work arms” of a Ferris Wheel that “lift again / toward that sickle of a moon” (I. Young). Abstract desire is rendered concrete, defned as much by what it is, as by what it is not: “obsidian, black gem. / It’s not about the color of the moon” (Tramonte), while the difference between plastic and glass is captured in the juxtaposition of the property of being “blown here on the whims of the wind” against the propensity towards “cutting bare feet in the grass” (McDonald). A constant presence across these poems is the figure of the poet as “supplier of dreams” (Young), one who prompts us to “contract and withdraw / to make a womb for the word” (Dolin), while invoking the beauty of silence, “a temporary miracle / of inarticulate language” (Camp).

This issue’s translations section features poems from a wide range of periods and languages, including seventh-century Arabic, fourteenthcentury Welsh, and contemporary Chinese, as well as a selection of French poems by Heather Dohollau. Among the themes that emerge in this selection are a fascination with the city as an epicenter of modern life and culture, as well as a shift inwards, toward the ruminations of the mind, as it grapples with its own limitations and uncertainties that abound. The urban space described by Rimbaud is rendered here as a place of “petty crime whimpering in the muddy street.” Other iterations of the city include its depiction as a space wherein “the only thing the garbage can is missing is garbage” (Ching), where “hollowness echoes” and “annihilation is so sudden” (Kyfundawt). In a crowded city, the “sky stretches to break out of its dream”, “atlases are lost,” (Köylü) and we are fortunate if something of us “remains that has not been razed to the ground” (Sofya). Existential angst is another running theme in this selection, from the discovery that your “fingers know nothing of high holy heavens” (Hatmi), to the realization that “love is a catastrophe” (Morales), which will lead you to follow “a sinuous curve around anguish” (Berenguer). Irony is also at work here, in the recognition that while we ruminate endlessly, “the chameleon just takes note of news that twists the face of the startle-ready” (al Rayb).

The motivation for this issue’s special feature on West Coast poetry comes from Mantis’s provenance at Stanford University, and from the fact that the journal’s editors are graduate students, all of whom have, at one point or another, called the Bay Area home. This selection features works by both prominent and emerging poets who live in and write about a region often characterized as wild and unruly, a testament both to the area’s rugged, expansive landscape and to its prevailing culture of free-spiritedness. Images from nature are woven through this selection, as are observations about the state of our politics. The selection as a whole compels us to notice the natural beauty that abounds, while reminding us of our responsibility to protect the only world we have.

Our Amherst section also reflects on questions of space and place, and how they inform and shape our thinking, though from a decidedly different perspective. This selection features works by poets who graduated from the liberal arts college, which carries influences of a strong New England poetic tradition forged by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur, among others. The poems included variously remember and recreate cherished spaces, inviting us to think about how poetry intervenes in our world, making visible what may otherwise go unnoticed.

Closing this issue is the feature “Embodied Mind,” which considers how poets wrestle with developments in cognitive science that compel us to rethink how we imagine the brain. The scholarly essays and reflective poems in this selection each point us in new directions for thinking and rethinking cognition, or what it means to be human.

What emerges from the dazzling mix of works in this issue is a rare combination of beauty and urgency, a powerful demonstration of how poetry helps to focus our attention on what truly matters. I trust that among the many works included, readers will find at least a few that speak directly to them.