Once again at the end of another year, we cannot acknowledge Christmas without looking to that part of the world where it all began. All we can do is hope that the genocide in and decimations of Gaza will stop, the illegal incursions into the West Bank end, the aggression and bombardment of Lebanon and now Syria will stop and that the remaining Israeli hostages will be able to go home. We hope, too, that hostilities in other parts of the world will cease: the Russian and Saudi aggressions in Ukraine and Yemen, respectively; the internal horrors of the Sudan, the Congo and other parts of the world.
And again, poetry in particular has played in highlighting and confronting the darkness. We need to hang onto that, to keep doing what many of us in the poetry community have been doing. A conversation with a senior businessman late in 2023, who had told me that ‘genocide’ was not a word they could use at work in connection with Israeli actions in Gaza – after which I said that the poetry community had been using it since the beginning – ended with his point that it was always the poets who would tell it like it is. Another acknowledged privately a few months ago that Israel’s action in Gaza was genocide, used that very word.
So thank-you to those who keep IS&T going: to editor Helen Ivory; to Kayleigh, Kobi, Sofïa and Zahra who have all been editing interns this year; to those who submit to us and who read the work published here; to those who follow us on our social media accounts – Instagram, Facebook and X – and who share our posts; and to those who have contributed to and bought our books.
Kate Birch
Publisher