Editor Interview: The Shore

Poems that push & ache.

Crazyhorse, Sugar House Review, Massachusetts Review, Fugue, Four Way Books, Persea Books, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel and Colorado Review.

Daniel Simko, Valencia Robin, Jake Adam York, Larry Levis,Yusef Komunyakaa, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Kimberly Grey, Catherine Pierce and Kevin Prufer.

We publish poems, not poets. For every issue, we aim to cultivate something that feels whole and connected. We publish poems that reveal and surprise without gimmick. We strive to make honest beautiful in the many ways it may manifest.

Make sure you have honed your diction, your images, your choice of form and sense of line. Every issue we have to reject poems we really love, so we are paying very close attention to the work to make those difficult choices. Follow the submission guidelines carefully and check out what we publish: it is all online and free!

3-5 poems in a single document that haunt us, that demand to be reread, not because we are confused, but because we are sure there is more to discover, to feel.

They submit more than once per submission period. We are a small staff and each of us read every single submission. In order to do that well we cannot accommodate multiple submissions from poets in a single period.

Cover letters are always read after we read and evaluate the subs. We use the bios below the poems on our site for pieces we accept. We are just as happy to publish a great poem from someone who has never published before as we are from someone famous. We care about cover letters in the sense that we care about the humanity of the poets submitting to us and it’s fun to be able to learn more about people, but only to that extent. Past publications and accolades don’t weigh on our acceptances or rejections.

We read every word of every piece. Sometimes we can tell something isn’t quite right for us early, but we still read it in case the piece proves us wrong.

Every piece has to be accepted unanimously by our three poetry editors, so we often discuss poems in depth that have caught one of our attention to see if we can reach consensus. We have weekly editorial meetings to do this. We sometimes end up holding a piece a few weeks because we think it is worth further discussion or because we are unsure how many poems we want to take from a submission.

When we are open for submissions, we are reading subs and taking notes on them almost every day. When the subs are closed, we are generating proofs, deciding on issue order and getting news of the issue out in the world. Throughout the cycle, our amazing staff is promoting our authors on social media, interviewing contributors, reviewing contributor books, making blog posts highlighting former contributors and acquiring issue art.

We do very little editing. Some few things are just to keep website formatting consistent and an author could always veto any adjustments in a final proof. Most pieces are published without any changes, but the author still gets a proof to review.

We nominate for anything we can including the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily and other prestigious anthologies.