gates open: national poetry month issue

A celebration of poetry, poets, and all the people who make this ancient art form still utterly vital, National Poetry Month occurs every April. The event was established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets and will be entering its twenty-first year in 2017. Many journals contribute to National Poetry Month, or NaPoMo, in their own lively, idiosyncratic ways. Here at Iron Horse, we devote an entire issue to the celebration. And as the submission period for our NaPoMo issue opens today, we're already getting excited.

We're excited to be wowed by submissions to this issue, as we were last year (this past April's issue featured work by immensely talented folks like Kenzie Allen, Nicholas Wong, Doug Paul Case, and the late Jason Bradford, to whom we dedicated the issue). We're excited to bring established poets into fresh dialogue with emerging poets. We're excited to bring you another stellar, gorgeous all-poetry issue of Iron Horse. We want to showcase contemporary poetry in as many of its wild forms as we can.

We're committed to supporting diverse voices and we particularly encourage submissions (in no particular order) from poets who identify as women, from poets of color, from LGBTQ poets and LGBTQ poets of color, and from poets who identify as people with disabilities, including non-visible disabilities.

Iron Horse is open now till October 21st for NaPoMo submissions. Send us 3-5 of your best poems in a single file via our Submittable page. Full guidelines for how to format and submit your manuscript are also provided on that page.

What we're looking for: poems that shake us up, that linger in the mind and send reverberations through the body; poems that reinvent old forms; poems that invent their own forms; poems that don't look like poems; poems that make us reconsider what poetry can do; poems that sing and make our listening new and necessary; poems that enliven, that readers will want to carry with them into the grocery store, out of the bowling alley, through the night.