Free Poetry Submissions 2025
Louder!
Issue 14 | Free the Verse
We are now accepting submissions for our Summer issue. While the theme and title of this issue is ‘Louder!’ we encourage you to interpret it creatively.
Our favourite poems are the unexpected kind. We love free verse poems that take familiar situations and turn them on their head, using unusual metaphors and drawing parallels no one else would see. Poems with a sense of place and story are always welcome, as are experimental pieces. You can read our latest issue, Arc, to get a sense of the poetry we publish.
The deadline for this issue is May 25th, 2025. Please read our general submission guidelines below before sending us your work:
Please submit one poem per issue. If you wish to submit more, our poetry competition (prize $100) allows unlimited entries.
‘Louder!’ is the title of the issue, and therefore should not be the title of your poem.
Your work must be original and unpublished, either in print on online. We will accept work that has appeared on your personal website or equivalent.
Please include a brief third-person bio with your submission, up to a maximum of 50 words. You are welcome to include details of previous publications, but this will have no impact on whether your poems will be selected for our magazine.
At this time, we only accept poems written in English. You are welcome to include words and phrases from other languages.
It is free to submit your work. At present we do not offer compensation to our authors. If your work is accepted for publication, it will be published in our digital magazine.
We accept simultaneous submissions. If one of your poems is accepted for publication elsewhere, please let us know immediately via our withdrawal form.
You must be over 18 years old to submit.
Not ready to enter just yet? Sign up for reminders:
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Frequently Asked Questions
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The title of Issue 14 will be ‘Louder!’. We prefer to keep the theme loose, as this allows the poem you submit to shape the direction the issue takes.
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The deadline for submissions for Issue 14 is May 25th, 2025. We usually leave submissions open for an extra 12 hours to ensure poets in all times zones are able to submit.
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Yes! We are based in the UK, but we accept submissions from anywhere in the world. We have published poets from many countries.
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Primarily English, as our small team of volunteers will only be able to read English poetry. You are very welcome to submit poems which include phrases and words from other languages. You may also submit a translated version of your poem along with the original if you wish. Get creative! As long as we can understand the poem, we won’t disqualify it.
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Yes, all our issue submissions are free.
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You can submit 1 poem per issue for free. If you’ve already submitted to the issue and would like to share more work with us, you may enter an unlimited number of poems to our bi-annual International Poetry Competition.
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Yes – we accept simultaneous submissions. Please notify us via our withdrawal form if your work gets accepted elsewhere.
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Just click the button to ‘Submit Your Work’. This will take you to the form, in which you can copy-and-paste your poem(s) and other details. When you submit the form, you will see a message thanking you for your submission. We do not send email confirmations for issue submissions.
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No, we prefer to let your poetry speak for itself. You will need to submit a short third-person bio (50 words max) which we publish in the issue if your poetry is accepted. This can be as detailed or as vague as you wish. You may include information of other publications in this bio.
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Currently, we do not offer compensation for accepted submissions. Your work will be published in our digital magazine (this is free and available to read / share). We are working towards paying each of our contributors for their poems – and we’re certainly much closer to making this happen than we were 1 year ago.
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We’re open to anything, but we love free-verse poetry. If you’d like to get a sense of what we’ve published in the past, you can read our previous issues (for free) here.
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None at all. If you are struggling to format your poem in our submission form, feel free to drop us an email. Previous submitters have pasted a Google Docs link into the submission form – this works too.
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As soon as we close one theme for submissions, we open the next. This means we’re always open for submissions! The best way to keep up-to-date with new calls for submissions is to subscribe to our mailing list. You can also follow us on Instagram, Threads and Twitter.
Featured Poems
Deep August – Jen Colclough
The sun is also a mouth,
gaping
in the face
of all the light
it cannot bear.
Learn to hear
the nightly cricket hum as a
hymnal…
The Moon, Reversed – Noah Mullinax
“before and after is just another false binary”
- Jenny Xie
When I think about death I imagine
birds flying straight into the Earth.
I think about you singing Big Thief,
buttermilk, the silvery glance at Divisoria
Florida Man – Jessica Wills
On March 15th, he decided,
sobriety was an unnecessary bore
and backflipped off
the neighbor’s roof crashing
through the glass skin of the
pool, black and mist under
the full moon.
The reliable ambulance screamed jettisoning him back to the hospital
Crows – Ali Nicolette
Sometimes you made me feel like the crows
Tipping wing over tip in the wild Santa Ana winds
Dancing together
Black and dark and shining in the weak November sun
And sometimes you made me feel like the crows
Picking over scraps spilled on the asphalt