We publish poets (as opposed to poems). We would like to spend time with your voice and see your range.
We welcome poets from all over the world.
We love prose poems, traditional forms (ghazals, villanelles, sestinas), love poems, sex poems, speculative poems, and experimental questionnaires, but we are not married to a style or genre. Send us your most exciting work. We want poems that make us go: “God, I wish I had written this!”
Some poets we love are Kaveh Akbar, Agha Shahid Ali, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Victoria Chang, Heather Christle, Tracy Fuad, Bob Hicok, Kim Hyesoon, Ilya Kaminsky, Luke Kennard, Li-Young Lee, Fran Lock, Kei Miller, Octavio Paz, Fernando Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnik, Mary Ruefle, Tim Seibles, Tanya Shirley, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, Yanyi, Jane Yeh…
Submission Guidelines
Send us up to 10 pages of poetry.
We only accept previously uncurated work. Please refer to this article for a more in-depth understanding of what that means.
We love cover letters and would prefer knowing whose work we are reading. We care about your identity. You are welcome to share your publication history, if any, though that would not influence our decision. Though please make sure that the document of your poems is stripped of any biographical information—use the cover note field for this.
We encourage simultaneous submissions. Feel free to submit your work to all the wonderful places you think will be a good home for your poems. You need not withdraw your poems if they get accepted elsewhere — if we like your work, we’ll find a way to work with you.
We like EB Garamond, 13 point font-size, and 1.15 line-spacing. If you are submitting prose poems (which, we repeat, we love) please justify your paragraphs. If you are unable to use our preferred formatting because of technical reasons, that is totally fine.
If we have previously declined your submission, you can submit again the following month.
We are open to translations as long as you have the rights from the author/publisher.
We generally respond within 6 weeks.
We offer $55 to all our poets. This is per contribution and not per piece. We are looking into various fundraising options so we can increase this amount. We are committed to putting poets first, so this is of utmost importance to us! If you want to help us in our efforts, please consider donating.
We nominate for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Fine Print
Submitting to ONLY POEMS signs you up for our newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime.
For the poets we publish, we have a contract that we share soon after our acceptance email and request you to sign.
Our contract states the following:
“Thank you for your permission to publish your work on our website. Other than this one-time permission to publish and archive online, you retain all rights to your work. If authors republish their work, we request that they, in good faith, give first-publication credit to ONLY POEMS.”
At present, we pay $55 to each featured Poet of the Week, and $11 for Poem of the Month. This is done via PayPal or Venmo.