Best New Zealand Poems 2009 was published online last week, and I was delighted to find that two poems from JAAM 27 (edited by Ingrid Horrocks) were selected:

• ‘North’ by Sarah Broom
• ‘A Hassidic story might start …’ by Lynn Jenner.

Congratulations to those poets, and also all the other poets included.

The editor for 2009 was Robyn Marsack, who is director of the Scottish Poetry Library, and also co-editor of the 2009 anthology Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Carcanet).

In her introduction she also mentions JAAM: ‘Poets shouldn’t take for granted the handsome New Zealand periodicals – such publications are few and far between here in the north. Landfall, Sport and JAAM suggest a very confident literary culture, and they’re the tip of it – Takahe, Bravado, the online issues such as 4th Floor and Turbine, all create a sense that poets have plenty of ways of getting poems out to readers.’

Woohoo! We’re included in the tip of NZ literary periodicals. How about that.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted work to JAAM 28, DanceDanceDance! And there are certainly a lot of you! We’ve had submissions from around 200 people, and multiple pieces of work from most submitters, so we’re going to be very busy reading them all and selecting work for publication.

We’ll try to get back to you all as soon as we can, but because there is so much and because we have to fit this in around full-time jobs and other commitments, it’s likely to be a few months before we’ve replied to all of you. Please be patient with us!

We’re really excited about how much interest we’ve had in this theme, and we’re looking forward to choreographing the issue and presenting it to you all, which we aim to do by September.

Thanks for dancing with us!