National Poetry Month 2019

For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices wants to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like . . . the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill.

Poetry Contest: Break Poetry Open

Open All April – Fee Free

Send us your poems that challenge what poems are, what poems do, how poems mean. We’re especially interested in new forms, new takes on existing forms, and experimental work, as well as poems that ask us to broaden our definitions of “poetry” in general. We want innovative and inclusive voices, poems no one has written yet, the poems inside you that have been begging to be written.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit 1-3 poems in a single document.

Submissions will be reviewed for suitability by Brain Mill Press staff. You will receive editorial development and feedback on your submitted piece and a contract granting Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece on Voices. You will retain all other rights to your work.

Your poetry and profile will be published on bmpvoices.com and promoted on our social media outlets. Your post will contain your headshot and bio, as well as information you may wish to include about recent work and your website and social media links.

Brain Mill Press strongly encourages submissions from people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers. Please direct inquiries not answered in this call to inquiries@brainmillpress.com.

Prizes

Each week, the Brain Mill Press editors will select one or more submitted poems as the editors’ choice pick(s) for the week. Editors’ choice selections may choose any poetry title from the Brain Mill Press catalog for their prize. In early May, the editors will select a winning poem, and the poet will receive the full collection of Brain Mill Press poetry titles for themselves, as well as a second collection to gift to an organization of their choice.

Animal Rescue

My position as liaison between the open-admissions city animal shelter and almost four hundred rescue partners skews mostly toward crisis management. An injured gannet arrives, stunned and unable to fly. A shedding python someone tried to mail to California, a neonate...

What’s Currently Shaping My Writing

Emily Corwin on her current poetry influences and selections from her collection MY TALL HANDSOME

I Wore My Blackest Hair

When I think of National Poetry Month, I think of high school me, trying to write thirty poems in thirty days with my slam poetry team and writing in slim but full notebooks and yelling verses into graffitied alleys in downtown Ann Arbor. When I think of National...

“Demons Are Not Fearless Black Boys with Imagination,” “Lake Girl,” and “Baby Island”

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Jeremiah Davis, Meg Eden, and Riley Welch. We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did. Demons Are Not Fearless...

If It Weren’t for Daphne Gottlieb

If it weren’t for Daphne Gottlieb, I wouldn’t be a poet. That sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true. Okay, I might have been a poet even if I’d never read her work but my poems wouldn’t be as brave. Since the summer of 2001, when I bought Why Things Burn at Quimby’s in...

Where Stillness and Resistance Have a Form

Expatriate Cheyenne writer Lance Henson’s new work in Dead Zone et autres textes has the same powerful slight lines, imagistic suggestiveness, and resistance vision of his earlier work. The poem “secret” claims the kind of revelation I have always discovered in...

This Winter, Poetry Said No

Poet Christine Brandel on a season in which the muse said “no.”

Jessica Mehta, Iulia Militaru, and Levi Cain

We are delighted to highlight this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Jessica Mehta, Iulia Militaru (translated by Claudia Serea), and Levi Cain. Iulia Militaru’s poem “This Is Not a Poem,” translated...

Break Poetry Open Contest Winner

Thank you to all the poets who shared their work this National Poetry Month, sending their words to us, helping us to Break Poetry Open. I was drawn again & again to the voices with messages insistent & urgent, those words on the page that demanded to be read...

Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon. We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did. i had a dream...

“Nine Months,” “Cryptic Crossword LV,” “Her / Him / Our / Their / Us / Them / They Body,” and “Jaws Was on TV on a Saturday Morning”

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Raymond Luczak, Holly Painter, henry 7. reneau, jr., and Mercury Marvin Sunderland. We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as...

Interview Erasure

Poet Rita Feinstein introduces a technique for producing poetry from interviews called “interview erasure.”

Poetry Month Spotlight

A National Poetry Month spotlight on the Bare Lit anthology, edited by Kavita Bhanot, Courttia Newland, and Mend Mariwany

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2019!

Dear TC Tolbert

Dear TC, I’m thinking of a photograph of a cactus blooming in the desert. That is always the way I will think of you and your work. It has nothing to do with any kind of cliché of prickliness, because I have never seen a sharp point to you. Maybe you have sharp points...