These days I spend most of my time looking out my window. It is how I remember spending a good deal of my childhood. Whether the comparison is true or not, I don't know; I haven't done the comparative math. I haven't been spending my time writing or learning new skills, which is fine. I have, though, for this feature spent time looking at back issues of A Public Space, where I have been a poetry editor since 2008. (I have done that simple arithmetic: 253 poets, 338 poems.) I'm really proud of this work. I feel like it is okay to be generous enough with myself to occupy that space briefly, because it has been my luck to have received these poems, and to have been a small part of publishing them. The poets and their poems create beauty in each issue of the magazine. Hopefully, this selection of poems from the archive are little windows out into the world.

Brett Fletcher Lauer is the poetry editor of A Public Space and the deputy director of the Poetry Society of America. He is the author of the memoir Fake Missed Connections: Divorce, Online Dating, and Other Failures (Soft Skull) and the collection of poetry A Hotel in Belgium (Four Way).

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Elisa Gabbert, "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die" (No. 28)

Camille Rankine, "Possession" (No. 21)

Patrizia Cavalli, Two Poems (No. 19)

Suzanne Buffman, "Altered Proverbs" (No. 17)

Stefania Heim, "Misericordia" (No. 15)

Lynn Melnick, "Sorrow, With Some Eye Contact" (No. 12)

John Yau, "Anchors and Screws" (No. 10)

Matthew Zapruder, "This Handwriting" (No. 08)

Graham Foust, Four Poems (No. 07)

Kevin Young, "I Don't Burn" (No. 05)