Welcome.
TRANSOM is poetry journal. We’ll let the poetry speak for itself.
The journal was founded by Kiki and Dan with the following in mind:
A transom is the bar of wood that separates a door from the window above it. What comes over the transom is lobbed, has grace, arcs in.
Andrew and Astrid are excited to run with that vision, providing a place for what has been lobbed to land. Honoring both energy and rest, TRANSOM is published on solstices and equinoxes.
Since its conception, TRANSOM has included poet interviews that dig deeper into an examination of poetry as it lives, in the world between poets and readers. TRANSOM continues in that tradition, inviting not only poetry, but lived and living experience.
Up and over,
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—To our readers:
It’s March 2020, and it’s a time of change. We’re in the early stages of a global pandemic, and though it will eventually be over, there will be a distinct division between the time before and the time after all of this happened. Going into this issue, we knew we were going to be learning how to live with some big changes (our firstborn was due between issues 13 and 14), but we could not have predicted all that would happen in the world. Here’s one full of space ships and ancient tech, paper cranes and clay pots. And noodz. Here’s one from the year of the new plague, in which we all live online and dial in to digital dance parties. Keep a safe distance. Wash your damn hands.
May we all emerge renewed.
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Hanlon. Illustration shows the Influenza epidemic of 1918, the "Spanish Flu," in the form of a devil rising from pools of saliva on the ground and reaching out to attack a well dressed man, with the text saying "stop spitting - everybody."