This 2022 volume is our tenth issue. It is no coincidence, then, that this issue echoes the durability and usefulness of aluminum and tin, the traditional tenth anniversary gifts. This volume, launched with a large-format print issue, quite literally reflects and shines and is our gift—from the staff and the contributors—to literary culture.
The design for this year’s Tab Journal emerges from a year of recognizing the complexities of choice, drawing boundaries, and acknowledging multidimensional anxieties of being between a rock and a hard place. As we continue to experience the compromises that go hand in hand with the pandemic, as we continue to face the relentless considerations of safe and dangerous spaces, this issue surveys concepts of shared corners and shelters, of physical and metaphorical places and spaces where individuals, pods, and communities take refuge.
The visual language in this issue draws on the mining of minerals—Arsenopyrite, Aluminum, Platinum, Tin, Tennantite, Titanium, Silver, Volcanic Rock—and a back-and-front scientific identification system to connect author and poem. Using a poster booklet, the reader can journey through poems and then unfold the booklet to meet their authors on the reverse side of the poster. The material object that this issue thereby makes manifest represents a relationship between surface and source.
This issue was digitally printed with two colors of ink (metallic and black), then scored, die-cut, and folded to achieve a poster booklet. It is, then, two forms in one, poster and booklet, each of which offers a different visual and tactile experience of scale and perspective.
This 2022 volume is our tenth issue. It is no coincidence, then, that it echoes the durability and usefulness of aluminum and tin, the traditional tenth-anniversary gifts. This volume, launched with a large-format print issue, quite literally reflects and shines and is our gift—from the staff and the contributors—to literary culture.
The design for 2022 emerges from a year of recognizing the complexities of choice, drawing boundaries, and acknowledging multidimensional anxieties of being between a rock and a hard place. The visual language draws on the mining of minerals—Arsenopyrite, Aluminum, Platinum, Tin, Tennantite, Titanium, Silver, Volcanic Rock. This volume surveys concepts of shared corners and shelters, of physical and metaphorical places and spaces where individuals, pods, and communities take refuge.
The online issues in the 2022 volume pick up elements of the print issue’s design, and the entire website is updated to reflect this and shape the reading experience.
Plague Year
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Tendrils
Kai Coggin
The Rule of the Table
Kylie Gellatly
Hope In, Clive
Hilary King
How to Meditate
Jenny Qi
A Night of a Merger
Bibinur Salykova
I Find This in my Mother’s Effects
Donna Spruijt-Metz
Poem Beginning with a Line from Adam Zagajewski
Patricia Clark
Into Wildflower Into Field
Kai Coggin
Icebreaker with Neruda
Hilary King
Past Lives and My Father’s Death Room
Dion O’Reilly
Still Life
Jenny Qi
Transition & Translation
Sherre Vernon
Trauerspiel of Water
María DeGuzmán
In Conversation: María DeGuzmán, Kylie Gellatly, Monica Ong, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Keith S. Wilson on Visual Poetry
Lydia Pejovic
Edward Lear’s Projection Limericks
Thomas Dilworth
Special Issue: California Coastal Commission K-12 Poetry Contest
Kindergarten–1st Grade
Winner
Wilderness in my City
Wyatt Thompson
Honorable Mention
The Pacific, Ocean
Zoe Corona
A Busy Day at the Beach
Kavya S. Iyer
2nd–3rd Grade
Winner
Whale Journey
Adelaide Harrison Cook
Honorable Mention
I Want to Live in the Ocean
Kavisha Gupta
Hermit Crab (at Buckhorn Cove)
Julien A. Mecum
Untitled
Saoirse Tien-Rickard
4th–6th Grade
Winner
Go With the Tide
Bony McKnight
Honorable Mention
Spectator
Anusha Garg
The Ocean
Emytis Keyhan
My Magical Place
Micah Yao
7th–9th Grade
Winner
My Home
Emily Mattea Hembruch
Honorable Mention
Beach Therapy
Kyomin Kwon
The Ocean, Our Home
Jessica Liao
Crude
Aarav Parihar
The Sands of Time
Viola Seda
10th–12th Grade
Winner
Black Girl Surfing
Zora Hollie
Honorable Mention
American Pipit
Ethne Anders
Oh, How the Waters Live
Sophia Cho
Night Tides, Reimagined
Elyse Hwang
Rainbow Trout
Emma Keas
I Could Dance on the Seas
Christina Li
Last Night I Dreamed of Huntington Beach
Dilinna Ugochukwu
The Lionesses of the Mind Are Dangerous and Talisman Against Divorce
Allison Blevins and Joshua Davis
Bucketsful
Brenda Cárdenas
an essence always is lost in translation, but also an essence is thereby created:
Ed Go
Botanical Sketching and Looking
Alicia Byrne Keane
How Not to Build a Model Rocket and Salvador Dalí with Anadromes
Orlando Ricardo Menes
Comhartha
Dan Murphy
Orchard After Storm and Afterglow
Donna Vorreyer
Postcard from the Cusp of No Way Back
Kory Wells
Marianne Moore and Style
Kirby Olson
Book Review: The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
Ian Koh
Sometimes the Deaf
Millicent Borges Accardi
Glome and Drom
Kazim Ali
How I Learned and Becoming the River
Shonda Buchanan
I want to say something in defense of the sparrow.
KateLynn Hibbard
Caught in the Lethe
Paul Jaskunas
The Apiary Library and Falling Back in Love
Alison Lubar
Bermuda Fireworm
Kim Roberts
Dangers of Dating
Ashish Kumar Singh
Recipes for Daughters Leaving and Instructions on leaving {mother}
Ellen Stone
Wild Ronan and The Theatre at the Centre of the Underworld: Subterranea
Sarah-Jane Crowson
Book Review: Mutiny by Phillip B. Williams
Jay Dye
How Wonderful the Earth Is Blue and Bisexual Epistle with Overlapping Circles
Andy Butter
The Undecided Dishes
Ion Corcos
School
Leslie Dianne
Ground
Farnaz Fatemi
Women in Aquatic Blue
Mureall Hebert
What There is To Lose
Frances Klein
Lux Hours
Carolyn Oliver
What Can a Poem Do?
Ronald J. Pelias
Another Queer Pastorial that Fails to Address White Supremacy
Amie Whittemore
Turtles
Jane Zwart
Dump
Gabriela Denise Frank
Book Review: They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets edited by Christine Kitano and Alycia Pirmohamed
Lydia Pejovic