Introduction

 
Sound surrounds us and becomes so commonplace that we don’t always pause to appreciate the fine gradations, colors, and textures of the audible world. Issue 20 of Young Ravens Literary Review is a dedicated space for exploring what poet Jeffery Allen Tobin calls “this aural architecture.” 
 
Poetry is naturally a sonic medium, and every poem provides a place to pause, listen, then add to the song of creation happening all around us.
 
Each artist in this issue records the melodies of nature with a uniquely tuned ear. Reader, we invite you to hear “chords of lightning bugs” (Willie Carver, “You Kids Be Quiet”), “immense oceans where rollers roar rhyme” (Jess Woolford, “awakening”), and the “sapphire syllables“ of grape hyacinths (Sarah Banks, “Grape Hyacinths“).
 
We also invite you to tune into the subtler sounds. Tammy Snyder points to how the body becomes an instrument of breath, a cycle of sensations moving through soft tissues (“Breath”), while George Moore finds “a distant ringing in the middle of my skull/ like the signature of sound itself keeping me awake to the world” (“In My Hearing the Sea). 
 
Silence itself becomes a kind of sound: “And there’s the voice saying/ to ignore every voice,/ to let yourself be taken/ by a silence/ lying between/ sun and moon” (Alexander Etheridge, “Sound of Grace).
 
Perhaps after all this listening, to the sounds without and within, you will find the hint of a distant home—“i       trace         the        sky     map/ meridianed    in       my       skull/ meteorite        boned       memories/ incanting          home” (Audra Burwell, “Self-actualization”)—or a melody only yours.