Bramble Summer 2025 print issue is available now.

Editor’s Note

Deep into middle age I realized, I love sports, especially basketball. The skill. The joy. The sexiness. So, I started writing about it and realized how embedded it was in my whole life from being on my hometown’s first girls’ Title IX basketball team to watching my son’s games. I just now finally had time to revel in it.

So, I’m very grateful for the opportunity to guest edit this Bramble issue. Thank you to Christina Kubasta for trusting me to bring it to life.

Thank you to our cover artist, Kaden Van De Loo who I know through Real Tinsel Art Gallery in Milwaukee where I had my studio for years. (And Kaden’s mom and I grew up in the same small town!) When I saw this artwork, I had to buy it. When I had the opportunity to edit this issue, I wanted it for the cover because it was muscular as well as clever and nimble, just like a great athlete.

Many thanks also to Esteban Colon and Sandra Marchetti, as well as the WFOP. At a WFOP conference, Esteban told me about Sandra and her baseball book after I told him I was working on a poetry collection about basketball. She and I connected, she critiqued my book, taught a sound in poetry class and made me a better poet. So of course, when I had the opportunity to guest edit this collection, I reached out to her for an interview. Don’t miss it!

And, of course, thank you to the amazing poets who fill these pages with sports poems peopled with kids and dads, grandmas and dogs, and Bob Uecker.

Here’s a poem from my in-progress poetry collection, Maybe Now Basketball which received honorable mention in the Wisconsin Writers Association Jade Ring Contest.

First Official Girls’ Team: Kaukauna, Wisconsin 1972

Congress members Bayh, Green and Mink hero
terms like sex and equal into civil law for us.
Daughters of Kaukauna farmers and millwrights
and doctors. Daughters born to mash the Jesus nothing
carbs Father whacks on our tongues. Mary Karen Sue Barb
Rose. Drilled to shuck flesh from bone by brothers and
cousins and boys next door, these girls jab float hesitate
explode. The boys I know lust and creep and teach me
hide not seek. Yet these girls endure my dud layups
and my tulle. They elect me most improved.

Lora Keller
July 2025

Lora Keller was voted most improved on her hometown’s first official girls’ basketball team after Title IX legislation passed. She still can’t shoot or dribble very well. Instead, she writes poems about basketball as well as fashion, mental health, nature, and sometimes body parts. Her poems have won numerous awards and are widely published including in McNeese Review, Reed, Sport Literate, The Midwest Quarterly, as well as Bramble. She is developing a collection of basketball poems titled Maybe Now Basketball. Early in her career, she was a journalist, scriptwriter, public relations executive, educator and small business owner in Milwaukee, New York City and Kansas City.

Artist Bio

Kaden Van De Loo is a painter based in Milwaukee, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing and a minor in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2024. Venues that have exhibited his work include Portrait Society Gallery (Milwaukee), Greenpoint Open Studios (New York City), and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s Allen Priebe and Annex Galleries. Recently, Van De Loo completed the year-long Bridge Work professional development program in Milwaukee through Plum Blossom Initiative and showed work in the Atlanta Art Fair. Portrait Society Gallery will be exhibiting a solo show of Van De Loo’s work in July and August 2025. Learn more on his website.

Artist Statement

Kaden Van De Loo’s paintings are isolated ecologies that geometric forms materialize out of and disappear into. Each painting develops from and within a single-colored ground, which acts like a supple membrane, airy atmosphere, syrupy pool, or waxy skin that forms can sink into, emerge from, or sit on top of. As the forms do not overlap or touch and are contained within the boundaries of the surface, they possess an otherworldly isolation that spotlights lateral relationships. Their materializations are powered by group dynamics: affiliation, hierarchy, gestalt, abnormality, and competition. By considering particular energies and gravities, forms activate, are activated by, or feel bound to other forms, pushing and pulling on each other as they hover and orbit. Guided by mysterious yet palpable forces, the result is a spatial physics in which forms settle into purposeful formations, like impossible celestial systems, strange microscopic or atomic structures, or arrangements of ritualistic objects.