We're looking for poems that are personal yet global, and explore human frailties with compassion and humor. The NUMBER ONE element we look for is a strong sense of character. You can describe the back streets of a foreign country with great finesse, but unless we know through whose eyes we are seeing the scene (a student? a college professor? a newly-divorced woman?) we won't feel a connection. Other areas of very strong interest include: coming of age, self discovery, self empowering, and unique perspectives from men and women about men and women.

Your poetry has a good chance of finding a home with us if you have a theme. We would be honored to accompany you on your journey from there to here.

While we appreciate an occasional love lost or love found poem, we'll pass on collections if there are too many that they all start to sound alike. We are not fans of poems that rhyme. We are tired of poems about characters from mythology—we would rather read about people we might run into at the gas station on Main Street.

When you submit, please include the poem that will appear first, and if your book is titled after one of the poems, please include that one too.

Please submit 5-8 of your best poems that have been refined, gone over, and stripped of typos. An average chapbook has 30-35 poems.

After reviewing your material, we will either request to see more, or pass. If we pass, we'll let you know what about your poetry didn't resonate with us. If you are interested in rewriting based upon our feedback, you are welcome to resubmit without paying a second reading fee.

We are writers too. Writers who hate getting form letters, and who have vowed never to do that to other writers. And so you will never receive a form letter from us.