Editor Interview: Moist Poetry Journal

Fresh lyric poetry

Psaltery & Lyre, Poetry Northwest, Stone Circle Review, Beestung, Ethel Zine, American Poetry Review, River Mouth Review

Natalie Diaz, Rachel Mennies, Morgan Parker, K. Iver, Diane Seuss, Emilia Phillips, Stephanie Burt, Brian Teare, T.C. Tolbert, CA Conrad

Moist “dwells in possibility,” to quote Emily Dickinson. At Moist, the editor and guest editors are interested in poetry that is in the process of becoming—not stanzas cut from stone, but the sound of water. Moist is formally queer, and embraces queer and many-gendered and environment-driven language.

Send us that gem of a strange poem of which you are secretly so proud. Send us your poems that live at the very edge of your life and language experience, that take risks. Remember we love a good sentence, and that Moist is not a place for comfortable binaries, of any kind!

Since Moist does love to issue special submission calls (the kink issue, the queer environment issue), the editors appreciate a submission that attends to the specific call and submits what is being solicited! So if three poems, you send three poems.

Usually submitters will not submit the requested number of pieces (three, or one, or whatever it is!)— or say they are submitting three pieces, and only one will be in the document submitted. Other common omissions include leaving out other element of the submission (author bio, poetry prompt, etc).

We do ask for an author bio in the cover letter field, as place and identity matter to us! Author bio can be as simple as “Anne Carson lives in Canada,” although frankly we hope for a little more.
Feel free to list other publications! Moist does love first time submitters, and throws a party when we publish someone’s first poem.

Since we publish poems, and they tend to be no longer than a page, we read the entire submission—even when we suspect it’s not quite right for us. It’s an honor to spend time with a submitter’s work.

If the submission is for a themed issue, there is sometimes a conversation between guest editor(s) and EIC—though the selection process is led by the guest editor(s).

The EIC leans into their Gemini rising energy, and their life is varied and full of small animals and chronic migraines and poetry. Sometimes submissions get read in bed (night reading is a fairly common practice for editors with day jobs and small children). Weekends offer the best time to sit with submissions.

Once in a while, we encourage an edit—a title, or a line or word revision. Overall, we find that poets don’t like to change their piece, so we tend to offer editing suggestions as just that—suggestions that the author can decline without affecting the publication offer. Author always has the final word on edits, and nothing will be changed without their express consent and permission.

We nominate for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes!