In tortured times art can seem like a privileged escape. Art has never won a war, or filled a belly, or jammed a gun. But as exiled poet and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz, who survived the totalitarian onslaughts of the last century, asked:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
We do not claim this issue will save any nation, nor its people. Yet in a time when totalitarian winds blow hard, there remains in art the very nuance power hopes to crush.
Totalitarianism generalizes, reducing all to one. But art resists. It sees and celebrates the particular. Art gives glimpses of lived lives, of faces and voices, of human dignity no power can crush. You can’t arrest nuance. You can’t deport beauty or metaphor or the sublime.
The art gathered here also lends nuance to place—the Midwest—the place that we call home. Once again in this issue, the authors and artists gathered here claim a connection, in some way, to the Midwest, a tie we do not define for them. We know one thing to be true: the Midwest is ungeneralizable. There’s too much nuance thriving here to ever comply.
Jill and Jeff
Midwest Review 