Happy National Poetry Month! For poets and poetry lovers—and perhaps for those who love poets—this is a special time. At Brain Mill Press, we like to celebrate all month long by sharing featured poets, and with our fee-free contest. This year, we’re thinking about poetry cycles, poems that speak to each other, forms that build on each other (like crowns), and the ways a poem can be a scaffold or foundation for other poems. Our words are often in response to other poems, and our own body of work is often an ongoing conversation. We speak to each other, with ourselves, and sometimes into the void—hoping someone will answer back.

In grad school, I had a professor who asked us to analyze our own work, looking for recurring images and language that were our go-to’s. The exercise revealed how often I circled a central (for me) image, and how often a certain word captured my way of seeing the world.

This April, we’d love to hear your poems that talk to each other: in imagery, in language, in forms—however you characterize that conversation. For our contest, we’ll be considering poems as a group, and sharing the Editors’ Picks and Winner for both how they speak to us and how they speak to each other.

Brain Mill Press seeks to highlight and platform the voices of underrepresented writers. We are inclusive and progressive, with a desire to read a variety of forms, aesthetics, and styles.