POETICS — Call for Submissions: Grain

Consider the grain.

Small enough to slip between your fingers. Ordinary enough to forget. And yet: everything.

Wheat, rice, barley, oat, rye, millet, corn. They feed us. They have fed us for ten thousand years. Before cities, before writing, before nearly everything we call civilization, there were grains. Scattered, planted, harvested, ground, shared.

A grain is almost nothing. A pile of grains is a meal, a season, a life.

The Sacred and the Daily

Grains hold contradictions.

They are ordinary. You ate them this morning without thinking. Toast. Oatmeal. The flour in your coffee cake. They are so common we forget to see them.

And they are sacred. The body of Christ is made from grain. The Passover table holds unleavened bread. Rice is thrown at weddings, offered at altars, pressed into the hands of the dead. Bread is broken and shared in nearly every culture on earth because grain is what we have. It is what the ground gives us.

Grains are fermented into beer, ale, whiskey. They become celebration. They become trouble. They become the thing we reach for at the end of a long day.

And for some, grains are the enemy. Celiac, allergy, intolerance. The body refusing what the earth offers. That, too, is a poem.

What We're Looking For

For the next issue of POETICS, we want your grains.

The rice your grandmother rinsed three times before cooking. The wheat fields you drove past and never stopped to photograph. The bread you baked during the pandemic. The beer your father drank. The communion wafer that dissolved on your tongue when you were seven and didn't understand any of it.

We want grains literal and grains metaphorical. Grains of sand, grains of truth, the way a single small thing can be uncountable, ordinary, essential.

We want the nourishment and the absence of it. The feast and the famine. The daily way we are fed and the sacred way we are fed and the way those two things are sometimes the same.

Submit

POETICS: Grain is open for submissions from January 1st - March 30th.

Send us your poems. Send us the small things that feed you.

BIP periodically publishes anthologies and our semi-annual POETICS journal. Submissions should be in Word or PDF format.

Authors maintain full copyright of their work and are not compensated.

 

We have a passion for undiscovered poets seeking to publish their first book.  Whether this is your first or your fourteenth book, we're excited to engage with you.

 Manuscripts should be approx 80-120 pages in length.  You can submit your manuscripts in Word or PDF format.  No reading fees are required.

Accepted submissions will be notified by email and offered a publishing contract.  All published authors are compensated.

 

At BIP we believe chapbooks have become undervalued and become little more than short poetry books.  We want to bring them back in the spirit of "zine culture" as short, fast, cheap works that allow work of any time to get into the hands of readers quickly, whether its an early seed of what will become a full poetry collection in the future or simply poems you don't feel belong elsewhere.

Submissions should be 20-40 pages in length in MS Word format.

Accepted submissions will be not be compensated.  No reading fees are required.

Learn more about XPRESS on our announcement page.