Announcing Our 2019 Best of the Net Nominees

Happy Friday! As we near the end of one year of our magazine’s being back in (virtual) print, the Lantern Review team is delighted to announce that we have nominated the following two poems for Best of the Net 2019.

Photo of Shamala Gallagher
(Portrait of the poet, with shoulder-length, dark-brown, gently windswept hair, dark-rimmed glasses, and a raspberry-colored top with a white floral print, smiling against a background of green leaves.)
Shamala Gallagher (Photo by Madeline Laguaite)

Shamala Gallagher, “Untitled (New Year’s Eve & a Death Tucked Inside)”
LR Issue 7.1 | March 2019

“It scared me when anyone loved anyone’s writing. For who then was left to love mine? And it is hard to write so punctuated by nights.”

Photo of W. Todd Kaneko  (Portrait of the poet, wearing black, rectangular glasses, a brown collared shirt with white embroidery on the yoke buttoned over a black tee, and a goatee. Books on white shelves line the wall in the background).
W. Todd Kaneko (Photo by Tyler Steimle)

W. Todd Kaneko, “The Birds Know What They Mean”
LR Issue 7.2 | May 2019

“I say, Minidoka—
what the birds mean is that
there is no such thing
as safety, barely shelter.”

Shamala and Todd’s poems sing in the dark. They whisper quietly in the mind’s ear, masterfully and unflinchingly tuning image and syntax line by line. Their tightly crafted openings and endings deliver a powerful gut punch each time we read them, and we’re so grateful to have gotten the chance to publish these two beautiful pieces this year.

Congratulations, Shamala and Todd, and we wish you the very best of luck in the Best of the Net selection process!

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