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Brow to Glass, Beauty Held, Sensation First, The Answer Back, Already Glowing.
The Wonder Issue / May 30, 2026
Welcome to The Wonder Issue, where the looking matters more than the finding. Today's poem, "The Window Seat," follows a speaker with brow pressed to cold glass somewhere above the clouds, watching light move past long stretches of dark, thinking of all the ones who stayed curious long after the world went to sleep around them. You will want to find it inside.
Inside Echoes, I return to May 30, 1903, and a boy in Harlem whose origin no one could trace, who read a famous poem about surrendering to death and wrote back with life instead. Inside Devices, imagery does what the mind cannot do alone. Inside DYK, that refusal becomes a citywide contest, a career, and one of the most astonishing debuts in American poetry. Inside Creative Spotlight, a poet walks people out into the dark and points at things that are already glowing.
The window is still open. The light below has not finished moving. Keep scrolling.
With wonder,
Jason
jasonzguest.com
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Featured Poem
Echoes
Devices
DYK
Creative Spotlight
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Featured Poem
The Window Seat
The Window Seat
By Jason Z Guest
I am above the clouds,
a passenger saddled up
in awe of a balance
between grace and thrust.
Spinning whiskers flail for lift
under the nose of nudging twins,
these Botero figurines bowing their
carbon fibre-epoxy composite chests
as we travel in the dark.
Beneath, outposts of stars
and occasional clusters
of yellow and orange gases
come and go, and I,
with brow to cool glass observe
with the same curiosity of
Kepler and Galileo,
imagining, searching for a truth
within the unknown worlds below.
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Echoes
On This Day: Wonder as Refusal
On May 30, 1903, Countee Cullen was born, though even that fact resists certainty. His birthplace has been recorded variously as Louisville, Baltimore, and New York City. He offered different accounts at different times. The origin story of one of the Harlem Renaissance's brightest voices begins, appropriately, with a mystery nobody has ever fully solved. |
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What is known is this: by nine he was in Harlem, by fifteen he had been taken in by the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, by twenty-two he had published Color, the debut collection that made him one of the most celebrated Black poets in America. Critics compared him to Keats. Literary magazines competed for his work. He won the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his Harvard master's degree while Harlem was still inventing itself around him.
But the poem that holds the most for this issue is "Yet Do I Marvel", fourteen lines that move through the ancient mysteries of God and suffering and end in a couplet that stops every room it enters:
"Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" One scholar described Cullen's world as "charged with wonder" and suspended in "unlimited expectation." That is exactly right. His wonder was not naive. It was the insistence, held against considerable pressure, that beauty was a legitimate response to an unjust world. He felt a poem about longing or grief or the natural world was not a retreat from the Black experience but its fullest possible expression.
Cullen would have turned 123 today. The couplet still lands.
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on YouTube preserve some of the most historically significant audio recordings, including this rare recording of Cullen reading "Heritage." Listen below.
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Devices
What the Eye Does Before the Mind Catches Up
Imagery is the oldest instruction a poem carries. Before argument, before music, before form, there is the thing seen: the frosted hood of a truck, the brow pressed to cool glass, the orange gases drifting past a window thirty thousand feet above nothing the speaker can name. Imagery does not describe experience. It hands the experience to the reader and steps back. |
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What makes imagery the device of wonder is its insistence on the specific. Wonder does not live in generalities. You cannot feel it for things in categories. You feel it for a star cluster against the moonless night, for a desert bird’s throat, for a specific quality of light that appears through a window you almost chose not to look through. The image forces specificity. It says: not beauty in the abstract, but the way the clouds looked from above them, their backs broad and white and wrong in a way that could only be seen from this angle, the angle nobody usually gets.
Ezra Pound, writing his rules for the Imagist movement in 1913, defined the image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Not a description. Not a report. A transmission. The image does not tell the reader what to feel. It recreates the conditions under which feeling becomes unavoidable. Wonder starts in the singular and radiates outward. Imagery is how it travels.
The craft of looking closely is more radical than it sounds in a world that rewards the quick scan.
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DYK
A Rendezvous with Life
In 1916, an American soldier-poet named Alan Seeger died in combat before ever seeing the poem that would make him famous. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" was written from the trenches of World War One, a young man's acceptance of his own likely end. It was published posthumously in 1917, widely anthologized, memorized by schoolchildren, and later quoted by presidents. Seeger died in combat in 1916 before he ever saw it in print. |
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A teenager in Harlem read it and wrote back.
Countee Cullen, somewhere between fifteen and seventeen years old, unknown birthplace, newly adopted, newly named, composed "I Have a Rendezvous with Life" as a direct response. It was not with death, but life. The poem won a citywide New York contest sponsored by the Federation of Women’s Clubs and was reprinted widely before Cullen had finished high school.
That is the whole argument for wonder in a single act: a boy with no origin story, holding a famous poem about surrendering to the dark, choosing instead to answer it with light. The poem that launched one of the Harlem Renaissance's brightest careers was not an imitation. It was a refusal.
Poets have always written back to the poems that tried to have the last word. That impulse is still very much alive.
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Creative Spotlight
Aimee
Nezhukumatathil:
A Practice of Staying Astonished
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is not a poet who works with grand themes. She works with fireflies and whale sharks. She works with the bioluminescent sea sparkle she calls by its proper name, noctiluca, and addresses like a long-lost friend. Her method is a close look held long enough that the ordinary becomes astonishing, every time, without apology. |
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Her fifth poetry collection, Night Owl (Ecco, 2026), extends this practice into the dark hours. Structured in nocturnal stages from Crepuscle through The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn, the book is built around what becomes visible only after the world has gone to bed: magic, sensuality, grief for the natural world, and fierce particular love for the people and creatures who share it. Lit Hub called it "a beacon in the dark." That is exactly right.
Nezhukumatathil has described wonder not as a feeling but as a discipline. A practice of staying curious. Of refusing to let familiarity close the eye. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi and leads firefly tours through the surrounding landscape, which is perhaps the best possible job description for what her poetry does: she walks people out into the dark and points at things that are already glowing.
In a moment when the news makes looking feel dangerous, she insists on it anyway.
Night Owl is one of the most anticipated poetry collections of 2026.
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