General submission guidelines
Send:
Confessional poetry. Love poetry with unflattering, pessimistic imagery. Politics with personal, tiny snapshots. Fighting against oppression and repression. Guilt. Poetry that make us nauseous. Sentimentality distorted with grittiness. Anything with strange and interesting imagery.
Get your hands dirty with real human emotion. Dark is okay here, as is political, erotic, absurd, disturbing, experimental, or poems that can't seem to fit in anywhere else. We'll give them a try. Free verse is much preferred. Prose-poetry is okay, too. No length minimums or maximums.
Don't send:
Do not send reprints, religious poems, or children's poems. While you may send poetry with crazy, complex spacing or formatting, we prefer experimental content over experimental form. Rhyming/form poetry is rarely accepted, unless heavily disguised.
Do not send poems you are unwilling to take responsibility for later. We are unable to withdraw your poems from our issues, even for interpersonal or job conflicts. You are welcome to use a psuedonym if you'd rather not connect the content of your poems with your real name.
The writer:
Since we know from personal experience the lack of spaces for voices of women and/or LGBT and/or queer writers, those are especially encouraged, but anyone is welcome to submit. We don't care about your credentials, only the quality of the pieces you submit. Since the magazine contains some adult material, you should be 18 years of age or older to submit.
Response times:
Poems will be accepted or rejected in one month or less. Please query after 30 days if you have not received a response. This helps work out potential spam folder errors. Once you have received a response, please report it ASAP at Duotrope's Digest. This helps us a great deal.
If accepted, you are guaranteed a spot in an upcoming issue, but will not be published until: approx. August 2011, as of today. If the wait is a problem, please do not submit. It is unacceptable to withdraw a poem after acceptance due to the wait.
That said, simultaneous submissions are perfectly okay, as long as you let us know immediately if your pieces are accepted elsewhere.
What'll happen:
Pieces that are accepted will be published in a free .pdf, as well as a paperback book available for purchase through Lulu.com. Issues are monthly.
Contributor biographies not sent in third-person form (as requested above) will be modified into third-person for consistency. In these instances, we will use gender-neutral pronouns, unless prior to publication the author requests a different preferred pronoun.
We cannot pay authors/artists at the current time, nor send print copies, but if we make any sort of profit, we'll try to change that. If accepted, all rights remain in the author's or artist's hands, and may be reprinted as long as you give previous publication credit to Breadcrumb Scabs.