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.
Kindergarten–1st Grade
Avyan Gupta: Coastal Chuckles
Devarsh Murthy: The Beach
Udit Sankaranarayanan: Carmel Beach Time
Nila Sivaprakash: Santa Cruz
2nd–3rd Grade
Adam Sadi: Coastal Harmony
Isaac Angelini: Jumping Elephants
Advay Hodge: I Love the Beach
Ashwath Narayanaganesh: Coastal Wonders
Lily Nguyen: Silly Willet
4th–6th Grade
Stephen Chen: Whispers of the California Coast
Margo Beccaris: Coastal Forest
Eleanor Checketts: The Estuary
Derek Leonard: The Sea Cookie
Sabina Soenen: Purple Octopus
7th–9th Grade
Brianna Su: we’re eight again
Maximilian Doan: #140
Arjun Kannan: Whispers of the Deep
Bao Le: A Vision of the Coast
Hyeonah Lee: A Fortunate Stroke of Crab-Shaped Serendipity
SiXian Zhang: SD Sunset
10th–12th Grade
Annika Trueheart Sklar: sunset
Ayan Bera: Ocean’s Healing Serenade
Albert Hill: Surprises by the Sea
Manya Sinvhal Kumar: Life of a Bubble on the Californian Coast
Emily Liu by SiXian Zhang: elegy for the drowning girl