As I read through The Lineup 4 for the first time, I remembered something I heard many years ago. "Poetry is about capturing a moment between moments." At the time, I was in a creative writing class and making my first stab at writing poetry. The course had started with short stories, and Part Two: Poetry was what I had to put up with in order to get part one.

 

I confess I fought epic battles with the instructor, marking my own prose ground with infantile petulance and general hissy-fittery. But somehow that comment got stuck in the recesses of my brain, a seed dropped on rocky ground. As the years passed, I began to see power in the shapes of words, of phrases, of moments captured and enlarged.

 

As I read through The Lineup 4 for the second time, I remembered something else I've heard many times: "All stories are mysteries." At its heart, any tale is a journey through the unknown, an exploration which leads us from what we think we know to what we need to know. That ancient admonition on the blank parts of the map, here there be monsters, isn't just a metaphor. Stories show us the way.

 

My third time through The Lineup 4, I found myself pausing, again and again. A poem differs from a story in that a poem may not exist to lead us to resolution. A poem may not be concerned with replacing what we think with know with what we need to know. A poem may, in contrast, winnow down to the interstices between life's darkest details and so illuminate and reveal. It may not answer, but rather lead us to further questions. And in the very act of asking we may achieve understanding the clearest answer can't always provide.

 

And so, on my fourth reading of The Lineup 4, I let myself get lost. I lost track of time, lost track of the mundane aspects of reading: the feel of the paper in my hands, the shape of letters and words. In becoming lost, I found myself on the same page again and again, simultaneously conscious of verse and awash with sudden blood in the instant before fear has time to flare. Steve Weddle masterfully captures that moment between moments in "The Balance Lost." I could say more, but Steve said it best himself. I urge you let his words infuse you, to lose yourself in the moment he paints.

 

For the fourth time, Gerald So has brought us The Lineup, and once again we can experience moments between moments, to see mysteries revealed, and to learn once again that here, indeed, be monsters.