Books from Wildhouse Poetry
Submissions to Wildhouse Poetry
Proposals for the attention of Wildhouse Poetry should be submitted through whp.submittable.com. Poetry submissions are now closed. Please subscribe to our newsletter and social media channels for more updates.
Wildhouse Poetry Prize: 2023 Chapbook Contest Winners
Nonprofit indie press Wildhouse Publishing recently concluded its 2023 Chapbook Contest, judged by renowned poet Jane Hirshfield. This contest launched the Wildhouse Poetry imprint, edited by Mark Burrows. Julie Sumner was the winner, and Robert Rice the finalist. Read this blog article for details on the winners and their chapbooks.
Wildhouse Poetry will be running more contests in the future, and they will be announced on this page.
About the Wildhouse Poetry Imprint
Poems happen to us. They are ‘experiences’ that effect something within us. They call us not to comprehend something, but rather to participate in the reality they gesture toward. As epiphanies, poems often do this in the ways they take us by surprise. Startlement is their familiar mode of entry. As Jane Hirshfield suggests, they ‘transport us into previously unanticipatable comprehensions,’ luring us beyond familiar assumptions, offering us glimpses as she puts it of ‘the as-yet-undiscovered [which] brings an enlargement of life.’”
—Mark S. Burrows, editor of Wildhouse Poetry
Wildhouse Poetry seeks writers who engage readers’ imagination and encourage them to find authentic ways of seeing and experiencing life in the midst of its complexities. We look for poems with a clear and recognizable voice, one rooted in reality and carried by the natural music of language. Rainer Maria Rilke once suggested that “poems are not, as many think, a matter of feelings; they are, rather, experiences.”
As experiences, they invite us to grasp something of our connectedness within the wider fabric of life. They open us into dimensions of life’s inexhaustible realities and ground us within the physical world to which we belong. Our interest is in poetry whose epiphanies remind us that our lives are subtler and more complex than we often imagine. Such poems should suggest something of what Robert Frost described as “an idea caught fresh in the act of dawning.” They should reflect Wildhouse Publications’ commitment “to bring transformative spiritual insights to readers for whom traditional religious expressions may not fit.”
An initial inquiry should include a sample of at least twenty representative poems from the collection together with a proposal that elaborates on the author’s readiness to publicize their work (via social media platforms, readings, etc.). Upon invitation by the Poetry Editor, poets will be asked to send the entire collection as they intend to have it published.
