17/06/2024
A call to poets and the poetry-affiliated! Submissions are open for our Fall 2024 issue, “Critical Constellations.”
A critical constellation is a made-up term for an artistic phenomenon that’s happening all the time: poets talking to each other intimately and specifically about each other’s works outside of the public eye. These constellations form between living poets, but they also form between the living and the dead and even versions of the same person (à la “Borges and I”). They are letters to young poets and words in air. They are scribblings on submissions passed back across a workshop table that sometimes—often—grow into lifelong friendships.
If we are lucky, we receive these constellations through edited correspondences, but these treatments are reserved only for those luminaries whose works were already widely celebrated. Instead, what we see of these constellations are usually made for the market: through authors’ blurbs or judges’ citations and forewords that endorse a winner’s manuscript.
A poet may win a manuscript contest. Yet, along with publication, the real prize is a close reader who, perhaps, may have given their work a chance to be understood. But what if those readers are already among us? Who have we already won? More importantly, who already might understand, whether they like it or not?
Critical Constellations is guest edited by .docx. Pitches and submissions are due July 1. You can find the full call through the link in our profile.
Image: Agnes Giberne’s The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (National Book Company, 1898).
