Submissions

Our only criteria for publishing a poem are its merits as a poem. Our only criteria for publishing prose — comments, reviews, brief notes and articles — will be relevance to our topic, adherence to the fundamentals of polite civic and literary discourse, and inherent interest. Any political point of view is welcome.

While most journals refuse to publish poems that have already appeared, even in magazines published in very small numbers, Poets and War accepts previously published poems. We believe that good poems deserve wider readership than a single appearance can provide.

While our attention at Poets and War is primarily on poems directly about war or its effects, we also consider poems that are instead about the fundamental human emotions and experiences that are often intensified in times of war, including — as an incomplete example of what we mean — grief, separation, sacrifice, struggle, dislocation, culture clashes, initiation, etc. Still, we primarily want war poems.

Poets and War welcomes good poems by civilians with no direct experience of war, as well as by service members and veterans . . . by anyone who writes good poems.