There are poems about addiction (Adam Stokell’s ‘Daylong’) suicide (Cyril Wong’s ‘By Christmas’) adultery (Tanya Grae’s ‘Wuthering’) and family violence, including Ann Marie Blanchard’s ‘resc(you)dog’.

… it’s my fault for being a
      delinquent teen, breaking a family (already broken), selling our
      acid-flecks: love hearts not red, we—a family of five—love
      green. You hit girl who consumes horse-tranquiliser, girl who
      turns limbs into non-limbs.

There are also a number of poems by poets living in my current hometown of Newcastle, including Danny Gentile’s ‘Revival’:

… It is
neither broken nor un—. It is reviving.

This sense of revival seems an appropriate place to finish the introduction and invite you to read the issue. It seems that in our post-digital and post-human world both poetry and the self clearly remain enduring anachronisms. As poet John Jenkins wrote in the comments stream for this issue:

Even writing poems in the following way: by programming a robotic system to use a random word generator, and with the poem’s length and structure similarly randomly generated (all this has been possible for some time) still tells you something about the person who would want to do this… An evasion of the personal, or huge curiosity as to what is possible? An absence of egoism or narcissism, or show-offy techno-bling?

I agree with Charles Whalley when he writes that ‘in poetry, as in everyday life, we are continually working through and negotiating with technology, with what it allows us to do and what sorts of people it allows us to be’. He reminds us: ‘Writing itself is a technology’.