The Brussels Review: Poetry Gold Star Program Gold Star Fee: eur €5.00

What we look for

Poems with friction: work that resists, that drags something sharp across the mind and stays. Not the polite poem, not the well-made poem with no pulse. We want the subjects people lower their voices for, handled with craft, not slogans.

Clarity over cleverness. Give us images we can see, touch, smell. If a poem needs a seminar to decode, it is not for us.

If you write about yourself, the self must not be the point. We publish poetry, not diary entries.

Endings that fracture, not endings that tie a bow. No morals, no conclusions, no abstraction named in the last line.

Form must come from necessity. Break a line because the line demands it, not because you were taught to. If a poem rhymes, it rhymes throughout. Prose poems are welcome: a poetic text is poetry at any length.

A poem must stand on its own spine. Homage, "after" and "inspired by" poems, and name-dropping don't help. We read every poem as if its dedication and epigraph were not there.

Length

3 to 7 poems, or a single long poem or sequence. We read more than we count.

Format

• All poems in a single document, each clearly titled.
• Your contact details and a short bio at the top, under your real name. Tell us where you live, what you do, and one small fact about your life. No list of publications or influences.
• Plain formatting: no decorative fonts, colour or images, and no layout doing the work of the poem.
• English throughout. Beyond a single word or phrase, untranslated passages are not accepted.
• doc, docx, txt or rtf. PDF files are not accepted.

Translations

Include the names and contact details of both the original author and the translator.

Originality

Unpublished anywhere, including personal blogs, websites and social media.

Simultaneous submissions

Welcome. Tell us at once if the work is accepted elsewhere.

Response schedule

Decisions go out in the first week of June and December.