Mentor Commentary:
Matt Mitchell

EDITORIAL MENTORSHIP 

Mentorship Recipient
I tend to call at night

Recipient Reflection: 
Winshen Liu

On "I tend to call at night" by Winshen Liu

by ​​Matt Mitchell

When I begin reading through the slush pile of a submission queue, I’m never looking for anything beyond a piece that makes me remember what a joy poetry can be, and what types of new language the poet can create within the binaries of their own curiosities. From the moment I read Winshen Liu’s “I tend to call at night,” I wanted every other person in existence to read it. What a gift her poem is, especially for how it unspools the beauty of language into a fit of distance and dares its reader to reckon with their own relationships.

Winshen and I went back and forth in a Google doc for a few weeks, writing and rewriting stanzas. Watching her process, seeing how she formulated and condensed her thoughts into eight stanzas, is an electric act. How does one begin to fit an eternity of memories into one page? “I tend to call at night” is not just a poem about a grandmother living on the other side of the world from her granddaughter. It’s an elegy for the closeness those two bodies can’t share in the midst of that missing proximity. 

What kept me returning to the poem over and over before finally accepting it was that final, beautiful stanza: “We both know then, this is the end/of the call, when every day/is an echo; another bao for/breakfast, dishes to be done.” There’s a certain brevity in the syntax, the quickness from “bao for breakfast” to “dishes to be done,” as if it linguistically matches the urgency for which the call ends. 

The part of mentorships that I love is how they keep me grounded in my own poetry. After working with Winshen, I went and wrote something on my own for the first time in months. This is the energy that solidifies my belief in the hope of poetry, that we can take the work of people we’ve never met and let their words—their vision of the world before them—guide where we ourselves go next. 

Matt Mitchell is a poet, essayist, and music critic from Northeast Ohio. He writes for MTV, SPIN, Pitchfork, Paste, Catapult, and LitHub, among other places. Matt is the author of two books, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021) and Vampire Burrito (Grieveland, 2023).

​Find him on Twitter @matt_mitchell48 and Instagram @yogurttowne. ​