As an editor Michelle Greenblatt had a keen eye for poems that are inventive, innovative, original—and under her stewardship Unlikely Stories has become one of the most exciting literary journals of recent times.
Prose poems, sonnets, ghazals, haibuns, visual poems, ekphrastic poems—to name a few—are regularly featured in the pages of Unlikely Stories. Though readers may be attracted to the startling variety of the work offered, it is the display of individual talent that makes this journal so distinctive. Each poem is like a gem of its own kind, and unique even among the other Unlikely poems—which is a testimony to Michelle's brilliance as an editor.
After admiring Unlikely Stories for a number of years, I finally submitted some of my own ghazals in the summer of 2014. I heard from Michelle in a matter of just a few days, and her note was one of gratitude. She was wonderfully engaging as she wrote of her admiration of the ghazal and of her own work with the form. This exchange with Michelle was revealing about her dedication as an editor. She read submissions as they came to her, immediately; and felt honored to receive manuscripts from the many poets who respected her work.
Michelle's untimely death in October has been an enormous loss for the poetry world, and it is a stark truth that she is irreplaceable as an editor. But in the issues of Unlikely Stories Michelle has left us the great example of her work, an ideal toward which to aspire.
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