Note: submit no more often than once every three months.

The rumen is our favorite portion of the cow’s stomach. It is here that gut microbes facilitate fermentation of ingested foodstuffs. It is here that all those difficult cereals and grasses, those hard-to-process things, start to break down. We like to think of literature as a sort of rumen, that narrow tunnel where things accrue, sit, on their way to something elemental.

We publish works that move in the conceptual, that draw the tangential lines between condition and potential. We seek work that blends neoclassical ideas with urban grunge, the high concepts of reality mixed with the low reductions of fantasy. Like the aforementioned digesta, we want things that find new meaning when thrust through the reticulum of the written word. We want humor, horror, strange fixations, canvases upended, bodies broken down cell by cell. We know, we know, there are plenty of submission guidelines with similarly vague poetasting out there. The fact is we don’t always know what we want until we see it, until we sit with it a while—ruminate on it, if you will.

We are interested in poetry that emphasize craft. We want poems with interesting forms, strong sonics, and striking images flawlessly rendered. Traditional forms are welcome but we lean more toward works that take risks and challenge notions of traditional poetics. We especially appreciate conceptual poems that do a few things really well rather than many things with mediocrity.