Welcome to PRISM’s annual theme issue. this year we decided to focus on form rather than a content-driven theme: we were drawn to the genre-bending landscape of contemporary micro-fiction and prose poetry, and the ways in which writers employ these forms to tell their stories.

We received just under a thousand submissions from writers all across Canada and around the world, and we spent months trimming the shortlist down to what would fit between the magazine’s covers. Questions we had while divvying up our slush pile reading included: what separates a short narrative poem from a short poetic narrative, anyway? is it word count? Metaphor? the intensity of imagery or the size of the figurative leaps?

Either way, both micro-fiction and prose poetry are incredibly demanding forms. to be successful, the writer needs to deliver a full emotional arc in a very compact space. the best micro-fiction or prose poem features a heightened attention to language—what Gary Lutz refers to as “steep verbal topography”—deft handling of characters and conflict in very few words, and a compelling voice.

We were incredibly excited to receive submissions of arresting new work from Barry Dempster, Pasha Malla, Jennica Harper, Ronald Koertge, and Nikki Reimer. Though we’d focused on form rather than content while composing our call for submissions, we nonetheless noticed patterns in storytelling emerge as we began the editing process for the issue. We found content influenced by internet communication (the self-referential, hypertext-like linkages in Michael reid Busk’s excerpts from “the eighties, a Brief Primer,” and the brief lines of nick thran’s “festival” that read like the “short, timely messages” of twitter); finely-wrought stories with sharp corners like Roy Kesey’s “come Due” and D.W. Wilson’s “Let Me try science”; and poems, like those of Antony Di Nardo, Jennica Harper, and Anne-Marie Turza, that delve into rich, fully realized and compact worlds.

Got a short attention span? Perfect. this issue is densely packed with everything we just mentioned and more—in fact, it’s the readerly equivalent of trail mix to get you through the long slog of winter.

—andrea bennett & Jeff Stautz