The Aftershock Review

'A jolt to the mainstream' - The Guardian

Issue Four of our bestselling magazine is coming. And this time, we ask - how do you follow an aftershock?

We’ve published the rupture. We know the wounds that exist. We’ve traced the tremor through body and system, through love and loss.

But what comes after?

The Aftershock Review will always be rooted in aftermath. In the delayed tremor. In the body remembering. In the quiet detonations that arrive years later. The aftershock is integral to who we are.

For Issue Four, we want to see what it becomes next.

We’re looking for poems that carry voltage. Poems that hold consequence. Work that understands that survival is not soft, and joy is not simple. We want poems about rebuilding — about systems and their failures, about inheritance: queer, familial, political, bodily. About what you keep. About what you refuse.

• Send us poems about desire that doesn’t apologise.
• About class and hunger and power.
• About cities. About illness. About sex. About faith.
• About tenderness that arrives armed.

And yes — send us the aftershock still moving through you. The fracture line. The reverberation. The language you had to invent in order to survive.

We want sharp, lyrical, emotionally intelligent work that risks something: formally, emotionally, intellectually. We’re not interested in platitudes or tidy redemption arcs. We’re interested in craft. Precision. Heat.

We publish poetry that reverberates.

If your poem leaves a mark — if it alters the air slightly after it’s read — it belongs here.

Most of all? We want to be surprised.

Prove how poetry reshapes our understanding.

Show us how trauma is defined by a tea towel you can't throw away. By a train ticket that is not a train ticket anymore. Show us what we cannot possibly know without reading your work.

We have a preference for poems under 22 lines (they’re more likely to fit on a single page), but we are absolutely open to longer, multi-page pieces when the work demands it.

Submission Guidelines

• Send up to 3 poems in a single Word or PDF document
• Poems must be previously unpublished
• Include a short third-person bio (50 words max)
• No simultaneous submissions (as stated in the call)
• Submission fee: normally £3 (with an optional tip-jar tier available when activated)

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