Terrapin Books Now Open for Submissions of Full-length Poetry Manuscripts

We will be open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts from January 24 thru February 28.

We plan to select 2-4 manuscripts each submission period.
​All submissions must go through Submittable.
Please read our FAQs page before submitting.
Any questions, please use the email address or the Contact Form on the Contact page.

Guidelines:
A manuscript of approximately 40-55 poems​. This will produce a book of approximately 90-110 pages. (Please note that your book will always be more pages than your manuscript. Page count for the book includes poems, front and back matter, blank pages, and section dividers).

Include contact information on title page (we do not read anonymous submissions)

One inch margins all around

Include Table of Contents

Include page numbers

Include Acknowledgments Page

• Please include a list of poems and journal titles rather than just a list of journal titles. Format as a list, not as a paragraph.

• Please note that we allow a maximum of 6 poems from a previously published chapbook. Regardless of the number of chapbooks, it’s no more than 6 chapbook poems. Poems previously published in a chapbook should be indicated as such on the Acknowledgments page. Include title of poem and title of chapbook.

In cover letter area include a brief bio and a 4-6 sentence description of your manuscript—in your own words, not a blurb
​
We recommend that 25-50% of the poems have been previously published. More than that is fine.

Simultaneous submission is acceptable but please immediately withdraw your manuscript if it's accepted elsewhere.

Please note that there is a minimal $12 reading fee to help cover our costs.

If you are resubmitting a manuscript, please explain in your cover letter how you revised it.
​
​We strongly suggest that you peruse at least one book from Terrapin Books before submitting. We suggest that you peruse the work of any press before you submit.

​Please note that at this time we are unable to accept manuscripts from outside of the US.
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Terrapin Books is committed to publishing outstanding books of poetry by outstanding poets. We intend to fully support our poets. We will edit your manuscript and work with you on revisions. We expect our poets to actively engage in promoting their books. We require our poets to maintain a dedicated website and to be a member of Facebook.

Our books are 6 x 9, paperback, perfect bound, color cover, with printed spine (poet's name, title, press).

We are committed to publishing accepted titles within six to ten months of acceptance. We do not maintain a long list of books-in-waiting.
​
We offer a standard contract, a generous number of author copies, a substantial discount on additional copies purchased by the author, and an annual royalty payment.

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Trish Hopkinson interviews me (Diane Lockward) about my new craft book, The Strategic Poet; the selection/publication process at Terrapin Books; and Terrapin’s current call for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts. Get a behind-the-scenes look into Terrapin Books.

 

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Yvonne Zipter Interviews Heather Swan

I've been feeling bad for poets whose books were released during the Pandemic, poets whose book launches were cancelled or never scheduled, poets who haven't been able to do in-person readings. I asked myself, Aside from buying lots of books, what could I do, especially for my own Terrapin poets? So I devised an idea for an interview series. I invited all of my Terrapin poets to select one poet whose book had come out during the Pandemic. They were invited to choose a poet whose book they'd read or wanted to read and then to come up with five questions for that poet to respond to. The response was wonderful! Thirteen poets offered to do a Q&A. Some of these were poets with a Pandemic book themselves but some were poets without a Pandemic book. Lots of generosity among my poets! Yvonne Zipter was the first Terrapin poet to volunteer; she chose to interview Heather Swan about her Terrapin book A Kinship with Ash.

Yvonne was also the first poet to complete her interview. Here is that Q&A.

Yvonne: With both of your parents artists—your father a painter, your mother a potter—were there ways that being surrounded by art influenced your work as a writer, in particular your poetry?

Heather: Growing up in studios with people who turned ideas into images made of paint and clay certainly affected me. I understood metaphor and the importance of art so intrinsically, it never occurred to me that others did not understand the world in that way. My life was filled with art and music and stories. My mother's craft required so much (literal) centering and concentration as well as trust in the process, like writing poems does. Everyone around me made things in order to make sense of our world or to comment on it. I learned to make pottery and sculpt and paint, but I also wrote everything down. I recorded images and thoughts in journals as a child. My writing now is filled with visual imagery and, I hope, layers of meaning that one could discover in a painting.

Yvonne: Your love of nature is evident throughout A Kinship with Ash. Have you always loved nature? From where does this appreciation spring?

Heather: I feel like I have always been a part of the natural world. I spent so much of my time outside as a little girl. The studios where my mother and father worked were luckily near spaces I could explore with my dog. I moved from the prairies and woodlands of the Midwest to Colorado where I lived in the mountains. Later we moved again to a town on the east coast by the ocean. Because I moved so often, my human friendships didn't last long, but my dog was a constant companion with whom I explored these landscapes and this allowed a deep connection to the birds, the insects, and the land. All the beings we encountered in those spaces led interesting and important lives and spoke in languages I didn't understand, but recognized as valuable and mysterious.

Yvonne: A number of the poems in this collection grapple with the effects of pesticides and climate change. They are all both heartbreaking and beautiful. What does writing such poems afford you?

Heather: The experience of loving this beautiful, fragile, miraculous planet at this historical moment also means being in touch with enormous grief as so many species are going extinct, as forest after forest is being killed, as fish are struggling to survive in toxic waters, as frogs and insects are disappearing. When I write, it is part elegy, part plea. When I write, I want to remember that while so much is being lost there is also so much to be grateful for. I hope that my poems are an invitation to readers to pay attention to the outrageous beauty and vast number of different intelligences out there as well as to question our impact on the world.

Yvonne: Your sweet motherhood poems also showcase your love of nature. My sense is that this entwining is part of what fuels your anxiety about the state of our world. Can you elaborate on this?

Heather: Funny, this question made me tear up. Yes, of course. I am a parent and a teacher. My children have grown up on trails, in trees, in canoes spotting birds, insects, and frogs. A part of their community. They ache knowing so much of what they love is at risk. I invite my students to connect with each other and the planet, so they will be invested in the work of care. I think all the time about the next generations. Will polar bears still exist? Will the oldest trees survive? Will the coral reef thrive? I want so much to be a responsible ancestor, not just to my children, but to all humans and non-humans. I would like my work to offer an invitation to intimacy with the earth and also hope that we can change things for the better.

Yvonne: The cover of your book is beautiful and evocative, with various ways to interpret its relationship to the book. Can you discuss the genesis of this piece of art becoming your cover and how it illuminates the poems within?

Heather: Emily Arthur and I met when we served together on a panel on Earth Day that basically asked what art is saying about the planet right now. Emily's work immediately seized my attention. Her prints depict ghost landscapes, places of cultural and natural erasure, while also serving to honor and revive the missing stories of her Cherokee ancestors. For a variety of reasons, these images exploring loss and survival after great violence resonated with me, on both a personal and global level. When I completed my manuscript, I knew that I wanted to ask Emily if I could use her work on the cover. I am so honored she said yes. The colors of the print on the cover hint at heat and ash as birds migrate across the image with the help of the stars. But how has their home changed? Is there still a home? Emily Arthur's sense of home is complicated by the removal of her people and the species eradicated by this process. Her work, I think, holds both sorrow and strength. I hope my poems, too, can allow someone to feel the loss, but also to remember the beauty and the hope there still is for renewal and recovery.

                                                             Click Cover for Amazon

 

Sample poem from Heather's book:

Rabbit

After a long numbness, I wake
and suddenly am noticing everything,
all of it piercing me with its beautiful,
radical trust: the carpenter bee tonguing
the needle of echinacea believing
in their sweetness, the exuberance
of an orange daylily unfolding itself
at the edge of the street, and the way
the moss knows the stone, and the stone
accepts its trespass, and the way the dog
on his leash turns to see if I’m holding on,
certain I know where to go. And the way
the baby rabbit—whose trembling ears
are the most delicate cups—trusts me,
because I pried the same dog’s jaw
off his hips, and then allows me to feed him
clover when his back legs no longer work,
forcing me to think about forgiveness
and those I need to forgive, and to hope
I am forgiven, and that just maybe
I can forgive myself. This unstoppable,
excruciating tenderness everywhere inviting
us, always inviting. And then later, the firefly
illuminating the lantern of its body,
like us, each time we laugh.


Heather Swan is a poet, nonfiction writer, and teacher. Her chapbook The Edge of Damage won the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Award. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, Cold Mountain Review, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Midwestern Gothic. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt Magazine, Catapult, Edge Effects, ISLE, and Minding Nature. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She has been the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award, the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship, and the August Derleth Award for Poetry. She teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she is a beekeeper.

Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (Terrapin Books, 2020), The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review,  Bellingham Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her published poems are currently being sold individually in two vending machines in Chicago to raise money for the nonprofit arts organization Arts Alive Chicago. She is also the author of the Russian historical novel, Infraction (Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2021) and the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. She is retired from the University of Chicago Press, where she was a manuscript editor.

Please visit the Terrapin Bookstore for these and other Terrapin Books.

Sample Bonus Prompts from The Strategic Poet

 FYI--Terrapin Books will open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts on January 24 and will remain open thru February 28. Please note that we publish only poets living in the US. Check our Guidelines and our FAQs. Then send us something wonderful.

  Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers

Click for Amazon

Now that the holidays have come and gone, it's time to return to your poetry. If Santa didn't bring you a copy of my latest craft book, The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft, perhaps you should gift yourself with a copy. To entice you and to give you something to work on until you have the book, I'm offering you below two of the 39 Bonus Prompts from the book.


114 fabulous poets contributed to this book, poets such as Ellen Bass, Jan Beatty, Diane Seuss, Dean Young, and George Bilgere. The book includes Craft Talks, Model Poems, Commentaries, and Prompts. It is suitable for use by poets working independently, by poets in writing groups, and by teachers in the classroom.

Here are the strategies covered in the sections of the book:



I. Descriptive Details

II. Diction

III. Imagery

IV. Sound Devices

V. Repetition

VI. Figurative Language: Simile

VII. Figurative Language: Metaphor

VIII. Figurative Language: Personification

IX. Figurative Language: Hyperbole

X. Figurative Language: Apostrophe

XI. Syntax
XII. Sonnet

XIII. Odd Forms

Each of these 13 sections ends with 3 Bonus Prompts. These focus on the specific strategy of the section. They have the twin benefits of being short and recyclable. I solicited these prompts from outstanding poets who are also outstanding teachers. Here are two of these prompts. Give them a try!

1. Section VIII focuses on Personification. The Bonus Prompt poet for that section is Kerrin McCadden, a high school English teacher in Vermont and Associate Director of The Frost Place in New Hampshire.

Your Word Bank Comes Alive
Build a ten-word word bank according to this formula: a place name (a park, a neighborhood, a city, town, or country), an insect, a weather term/event, a tool, a geographical feature, a period or event in history, a term that has to do with furniture, and three words you like the sound of. Now, write a poem in the voice of an object you care deeply about. Let the object tell its story, or talk about you, make complaints, pontificate, or muse—but you must include all the words from your word bank. In a final draft, you might kick these words out of your poem, but their job is to push your imagination into sparking through the act of weighing what you love against words you might struggle to use.

2. 
Section XII focuses on the Sonnet. Poet Jeffrey Bean provides three delightful prompts for this form. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Central Michigan University.



Animal in an Invented Sonnet

Write a sonnet about an animal. Don’t choose a traditional sonnet form—instead, devise your own fourteen-line rhyme scheme. Feel free to use meter or abandon it. Either way, use concrete imagery to bring the animal to life. What colors, smells, textures does it evoke? Try to engage all five senses and use sound and syntax to embody this animal’s movements, the noises it makes, how it feels to touch it or look at it or stand in its presence.

The Tradition of Santa Clause: A Letter

Each Christmas I like to revisit the following essay from the The Sun. My grandmother read it to me many years ago. I've always remembered it. If you don't already know this piece, I hope you'll enjoy it. I also hope you'll have a Merry Christmas if that's what you're celebrating. And I hope you'll have a wonderful New Year. Thank you for being a Blogalicious reader.

Eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York's The Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial on September 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history's most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps.


Here's Virginia's letter:

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."


Here's the reply:

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

The Strategic Poet Update/ news, poems, prompt, and video

My new craft book, The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft, is now available as both a print book and an ebook. I hope that you will consider the book for your holiday gift giving. And don't forget to give yourself the gift of craft talks, model poems, prompts, commentaries from the poets, and bonus prompts. You should not experience any supply chain issues when ordering this book as it's fully available.

I am very grateful to contributor Karen Paul Holmes who made a wonderful video for the book. She recorded herself reading a model poem by Sean Shearer, "Rewinding an Overdose on a Projector," and then her own Sample Poem, "Slow-Motion, Reverse-Replay, Myocardial Infarction," which she wrote using the prompt that follows Sean's poem. Both poems, Sean's commentary on his use of similes, the prompt, and the video appear below.

From the Exciting News Department: My book has just received the lovely honor of being named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers magazine!

Sample Prompt from The Strategic Poet:

Rewinding an Overdose on a Projector
 
Blacker. Black. The foam drools back
up his chin, over his lips and behind his teeth.
The boy on the floor floats onto the bed.
Gravity returns. His hands twitch.
The heart wakes like a handcar pumping faster and faster
on its greased tracks. Eyes flick open.
Blood threads through a needle, draws into a tube.
The syringe handle lifts his thumb.
The hole in his vein where he left us seals.
The boy injects a liquid into the cotton
that drowns inside a spoon. He unties the leather belt
around his arm, pushes the sleeve to his wrist.
The wet cotton lifts, fluffs into a dry white ball.
The flame beneath the spoon shrinks to a spark,
is sucked inside the chamber where it grows cold,
then colder. The heroin bubbles to powder.
The water pours into a plastic bottle. The powder rains
into a vial where it sleeps like an only child.
All the contents on the bed spill into a bag.
The boy stands, feeds his belt through the loops.
This is where I snip the film and burn it.
What remains are the few hundred frames
reeling: the boy unlocking a bedroom door,
a black jacket rising from the floor, each sleeve
taking an arm like a mother and father.

                        —Sean Shearer

~~~~~
 
Craft Analysis:

The narrative action in this poem is reversed. Something horrible has happened—a heroin overdose. As we all do after horrible events, the speaker wishes to turn back the clock. Therefore, he begins at the end of the story, reversing and undoing each action that led up to the overdose and its catastrophic conclusion.
 
Notice the declarative sentences with their article/subject/action verb construction, e.g., The foam drools, The heart wakes, The boy injects. Notice too the flat, lifeless tone that results from this syntax, ironically at odds with the use of the personal first-person speaker.
 
The imagery makes the scene one we can see. Much of the imagery results from the strong verbs: Eyes flick open, Blood threads, The syringe handle lifts his thumb. The poet forces us to see the scene. And because we see it, we feel it.
 
In lines 5, 18, and 25 the poet employs three powerful similes, each of which illustrates that sometimes a simile works better than a metaphor. In the closing simile, the speaker describes the boy’s black jacket, each sleeve / taking an arm like a mother and a father. This closing simile makes our hearts ache for the boy and his parents.
 
The poet might have given more prominence to the actions by using stanzas, but he opted to use a single stanza which contributes to the poem’s fast pace and the absence of the relief that stanza breaks might bring.

~~~~~
 
Prompt based on Sean's poem:
 
For your own reverse action poem, first choose an event that had a negative outcome. This could be something you experienced, observed, or heard about from someone else. It could also be something you heard or read about in the news. Perhaps a dog getting killed by a car, a heart attack, a house fire.
 
Then make a list of actions leading up to the end. Put these actions in chronological order. This is just a list, not a draft.
 
Now beginning at the end of your list, draft your poem, ending with what’s at the beginning of your list.
 
Use a first-person speaker.
 
Use declarative sentences. Use active and energetic verbs.
 
As you revise, work in some imagery and similes. Put your strongest simile at the end of the poem.
 
How does the single stanza work for your poem? Feel free to try a different format.
 
~~~~~
 
Sean's Commentary: The Function of Similes in his poem
 
Although this poem is sparse in similes, the emotional weight of each one tends to be heavier the more the reader moves through the poem. The first one that appears is the heart being compared to the vehicle of the handcar as it wakes. Not much of an emotional weight, but it begins the poem’s rhetorical structure of the body being this rickety vehicle for the subject. The next two similes are the opposite as they compare inanimate objects to a living thing. These similes are hermetically tied to family, i.e., only child, mother, and father.

“Rewinding an Overdose on a Projector” is about the practicalities of shooting up heroin, an ugly subject matter. When you have the amalgam of a family setting beneath the poem, it creates a much stranger and stronger emotional weight for the reader. That last simile in the poem will always haunt me when I read it. The speaker is clutching these bodies that signify a balance or protection in life—a mother and a father—whereas we already know from the very beginning of the poem that the speaker can no longer be protected.
 
~~~~~
 
Karen's Sample Poem written using the above prompt:

Slow-Motion Reverse-Replay, Myocardial Infarction
 
Shards of crystal rise
from the terracotta floor, swirl
as if charmed by a wizard’s circling wand.
They form the stem, then bowl
of last night’s wineglass, which floats
to the counter
just as his heart starts again,
the slow wingbeat of a great heron,
its reliable lub dub, lub dub.
Purple bruises on his cheek fade,
rosiness returns, feet pulse with cozy blood.
His knees unbuckle. He rises.
Settles into his chair’s knowing shape.

[Pause.     
That’s the stop-action I want
burnt on my retina.]
 
He’s like a buoyant boy on a birthday,
lips pursed for the Bulldog kickoff,
a gruff WOOF WOOF WOOF!  
He’s glued to TV’s pre-game pomp—
Georgia-Alabama—texting buddies 
Tide ain’t gonna roll today!
The ambulance never needs to scream. 
The house isn’t skin-prickling quiet.
My key doesn’t shake in the lock.
On the two-hour trip, my gut isn’t sick, 
my brain doesn’t fast-talk—
his phone must be dead, his phone must be lost.
Instead, I waltz with the hairpin curves,
Cat Stevens singing “Morning Has Broken.”      
My heart stays with October’s trees—
the red flags only their leaves.  

                        —Karen Paul Holmes

Amazon

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The Strategic Poet Just Published

I'm thrilled to tell you that The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft is now available.

Available at:

Amazon

B&N
Bookshop

114 fabulous poets have work in this book, poets as George Bilgere, Jan Beatty, Traci Brimhall, Annie Finch, Camille Dungy, Danusha Lameris, Ada Limon, Matthew Olzmann, Diane Seuss, and Dean Young (see back cover below for the complete list).


 


The book is organized into 13 sections, each devoted to a specific poetic strategy:

I. Descriptive Details

II. Diction

III. Imagery

IV. Sound Devices

V. Repetition

VI. Figurative Language: Simile

VII. Figurative Language: Metaphor

VIII. Figurative Language: Personification

IX. Figurative Language: Hyperbole

X. Figurative Language: Apostrophe

XI. Syntax

XII. Sonnet

XIII. Odd Forms

In addition to the section strategies listed above, many other techniques are covered along the way.

Each section begins with a Craft Talk devoted to the section strategy, then is followed by 3 model poems. Each model poem is accompanied by analysis of its craft elements. Each model poem's analysis is followed by a prompt which asks the reader/writer/poet to do what the model poem does.

One model poem in each section is followed by a Commentary from the poet who wrote the poem. I solicited these commentaries and invited the poets to comment on a specific element of their poem.

Each model poem's prompt is followed by 2 sample poems to illustrate what might be done with the prompts and to illustrate that outstanding poems can result from prompts. These 78 poems were submitted by an additional 72 poets.

Each section ends with an additional 3 prompts. These 39 prompts were solicited from a variety of fabulous poets who also teach.

This book can be used by poets working independently, by poets in writing groups, and by poets in workshops. It should also make an ideal text for the poetry classroom.

Thanks for your support throughout the writing/editing of this book. You are an important part of it even if your work isn't in it. And thanks to all of you who pre-ordered the book and made it the #1 New Release at Amazon in the Poetry Writing Reference category!

Available at:

Amazon


B&N

Bookshop

Available at:

Amazon


B&N

Bookshop

The Strategic Poet Available for Pre-Orders

I'm thrilled to tell you that The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft is now available for pre-orders.

Pre-orders available at:

Amazon

B&N

114 fabulous poets have work in this book, poets as George Bilgere, Jan Beatty, Traci Brimhall, Annie Finch, Camille Dungy, Danusha Lameris, Ada Limon, Matthew Olzmann, Diane Seuss, and Dean Young (see back cover below for the complete list).


 



The book is organized into 13 sections, each devoted to a specific poetic strategy:

I. Descriptive Details

II. Diction

III. Imagery

IV. Sound Devices

V. Repetition

VI. Figurative Language: Simile

VII. Figurative Language: Metaphor

VIII. Figurative Language: Personification

IX. Figurative Language: Hyperbole

X. Figurative Language: Apostrophe

XI. Syntax

XII. Sonnet

XIII. Odd Forms

In addition to the section strategies listed above, many other techniques are covered along the way.

Each section begins with a Craft Talk devoted to the section strategy, then is followed by 3 model poems. Each model poem is accompanied by analysis of its craft elements. Each model poem's analysis is followed by a prompt which asks the reader/writer/poet to do what the model poem does.

One model poem in each section is followed by a Commentary from the poet who wrote the poem. I solicited these commentaries and invited the poets to comment on a specific element of their poem.

Each model poem's prompt is followed by 2 sample poems to illustrate what might be done with the prompts and to illustrate that outstanding poems can result from prompts. These 78 poems were submitted by an additional 72 poets.

Each section ends with an additional 3 prompts. These 39 prompts were solicited from a variety of fabulous poets who also teach.

The book's official release date is October 13, but you can pre-order now. Pre-orders are lovely as they dramatically affect early sales to online bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon. They also affect the kind and number of promotions that such sites do for a title. So if you'd go ahead and pre-order now, you'd be doing me a very nice service. Plus, you would then have the book by the release date.

This book can be used by poets working independently, by poets in writing groups, and by poets in workshops. It should also make an ideal text for the poetry classroom.

Thanks for your support throughout the writing/editing of this book. You are an important part of it even if your work isn't in it.

Pre-orders available at:

Amazon

B&N