As the new year begins, I am filled with a sense of longing: longing for a new day, new voice, new vision. It seems
that we are in the grip of forces from the past that were never reconciled after the Civil War. Then there is the pandemic
and the war in Ukraine, with their own antecedents and still — or again? — very much in the present. With all the talk about healing wounds, and the importance of poetry in healing, I sometimes wonder about the need to excavate wounds (after Saidiya Hartman), to take a better look at the tissue and arteries that lie open before us.
The Poetry Porch 2023 is reading submissions now: poetry, essays, stories, reviews.
Poetry and prose pieces will be considered for publication. We invite you to submit whatever you are working on: short
pieces, long pieces, or works in sequence. We look forward to reading what comes through the mail and over the Internet.
If you have questions about this prompt, please send them by email to Poetry Porch
Mail .
NOTE: The Poetry Porch is no longer accepting simultaneous submissions. Acceptances go out in March, and the new edition will be online by early April.
Joyce Wilson
January 2023
Poems: send 3 to 8 poems. We are looking for poetry that is formal or informal, that adheres to strict meter and rhyme or experiments with them, that is personal or objective, classical or modern, urban or pastoral. These should be original and not previously published.
Essays and stories: These can be 300 to 4000 words in length and on a topic that we agree is literary and that shows an engagement with language.
Sonnets: We are interested in original unpublished sonnets to add to The Sonnet Scroll.
Reviews: Critical reviews (300 to 1500 words) of first books of poetry, collections, groups of books, and chapbooks. Book reviews can discuss a current publication or introduce a book published in the past that might have been overlooked or that will justify a reconsideration. We suggest that the reviewer state what the author has set out to do and discuss how well he or she has done it, quoting specific examples from the original.
Email or US mail: Send attachments (doc or docx, pages, odt or or rtf, pdf) or paste text into the message box
to jpwwilson@comcast.net or through the link on The Poetry Porch pages.
Or you may send hard copies through US mail to Joyce Wilson, Editor, The Poetry Porch, 158 Hollett Street, Scituate, MA 02066.
Contact information: Please include contact information on every page of your submission (name, email, telephone,
and postal mailing address) and a brief biographical statement to let us know who you are, how you heard about
The Poetry Porch, where you have published, and other relevant information.