CRR

What does it mean to write in the now? This is the central question of our forthcoming issue. The moment is never an isolated thing: our present is the summation of all of our past experiences, as each moment we inhabit is filtered through every preceding thought or feeling we have ever had. It’s tempting to imagine that the present arises without precedent. But the real work of poetry is in recognising the poetic now as nothing more than a single frame of a moving picture. The writer can pause the film a moment and capture what she finds, but even as she works, she’ll remember that the picture has already been playing for hours. And yet this captured, momentary image – this work of art – ought to appear not merely as a fragment, but as a complete being, an apparition conjured entirely on the page.  

In the late Renaissance, a certain printed image flourished across Europe: the hybrid creature, like the one at the left, a monstrous image carved into a single block of hardwood and then inked and printed and distributed as a collector’s item or part of a religious pamphlet. Though outlandish, these creatures were not wholly new or imagined: they had been pierced together out of familiar parts. The head of a goat. The body of a snake. The eyes, perhaps, of a man. These artists forged new and powerfully striking images out of the recognizable fragments of their past. 

To a Renaissance viewer, these woodcuts both inherited the past and were themselves persuasively new. They depicted a world that was both continuous and rich with rupture, excesses, and divine intervention. And since the creature’s hybrid form reflects elements of the human body, it showed contemporaries an image of themselves refracted. 

We think of Cherry Road Review in the same way— as a place to cherish the ongoingness of the moment. There is a thrill in facilitating that negotiation between what has happened and what is likely to happen next. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to those sixteenth-century woodcuts of impossible creatures: the three-headed, bird-beaked, serpent-necked bodies that so confidently announce themselves as having appeared from somewhere. At Cherry Road, we believe in art that represents each new moment as emerging out of the pieces of its past. 

So I write today not merely to share our vision but to extend a further invitation.

If you’ve been writing or creating art, we want to hear from you. Send us the piece that both inherits and interrupts—the piece that demands to be read again. Submissions can be sent through our Google Form and will remain open until August 15, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.

In the meantime, join the conversation via our Instagram (@cherryroadreview) and Bluesky (cherryroadreview.bsky.social). We’d love to hear from you.

That’s all for now. We can’t wait to see what you send us and to share this first issue with you soon.

Charlotte Ungar
Editor, Cherry Road Review