POETRY

The Poetry Editor welcomes both agented and unagented submissions via email to martha@cheeriopublishing.com.

Submissions are welcomed as full manuscripts (usually around fifty poems, though we are very flexible), works in progress, or as proposals for projects. Some broad guidelines:

• Send your manuscript as a Word document or PDF file in a reasonable, readable typeface (unless the particular form of the poetry prohibits this)

• In the body of the email tell us about the book or project you're submitting, and as much about yourself as you'd like us to know

• Simultaneous submissions are fine, but do let us know at time of submission if you are sending the manuscript out elsewhere, and let us know speedily if it is taken by another publisher

• We will aim to return a decision to you within eight weeks

Martha writes: I don't want to be too prescriptive in describing 'what I'm looking for'. There's good poetry being written everywhere, from the experimental to the traditional, in English and in languages other than English, across forms and formats – and I would like to read it. The usual requirements apply, perhaps: it's true to say I'd like to be surprised, jolted, led to see unexpected angles and fresh perspectives and intriguing conjunctions. I would like to read poetry from voices that tend to be marginalised or less-often heard. Poetry that fronts up to the big picture as well as coming close for the fine detail. Poetry with a fine ear for euphony, yet a depth of engagement with its subject. But here's the problem with writing this sort of call for submissions – in attempting to solicit the specific it's easy to end up being vague. CHEERIO homepage, and its ethos, offers this from Francis Bacon: The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. The poetry I most admire does exactly this – it complicates; it poses questions it doesn't necessarily seek to answer; it brings close and entangles that which was previously separate. Often, it makes pattern and puzzle out of sound and word. What am I hoping to read in submissions? Well, good poetry. Something exciting and inventive; something to deepen the mystery.