Current Issue - Tab Journal

The annual, distinctive print issue of Tab: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics engages the reader with poetry as a material object and asks the reader to negotiate between image and text. The design does not assume a traditional role of unobtrusively framing content; instead, design actively shapes the reading experience and experiments with the intersections between form and content, object and space, and reader and reading.

The 2025 print issue explores concepts of trickster, chance, and shifting expectations. The trickster appears in the folklore of many cultures and is one of the oldest expressions of growing civilizations. The trickster embodies wit and deceit, taking advantage of expectation and chance, building meaning only to unravel it. To “describe the trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there,” writes Lewis Hyde in Trickster Makes This World. Poetry, too, invites convention and surprise as it creates lines, crosses lines, erases, and moves.

The design of this issue of Tab Journal echoes this duality, complementarity, and contradiction with the contrast between striking color and stark black and white, as well as the layered scapes that alter reality into warped realms that redefine portals, trap doors, and concealed dead ends and loops. Typography and alignment shift playfully between order, disorder, and reorder to mirror the trickster’s sleight of hand in the process of reading the poem. The format revisits the large sheet of earlier print issues, folded to create the expectation of order but ultimately revealing deconstructed panels and variations of skew.

To request one or more copies of the print issue, please use the Contact form.

Special Issue: California Coastal Commission Poetry Contest

Every year, Tabula Poetica selects finalists for the Coastal Poetry Contest for K-12 students hosted by the California Coastal Commission. This year, Chapman University students in Tab Journal Editor Anna Leahy’s MFA poetry writing class selected the finalists. Tab Journal is thrilled to share the poems of young Californians as part of this collaboration with the community and Annie Frankel, the Public Education Program of the California Coastal Commission.

Tab Journal Vol 13.3 June 2025 Download