I have two new poems coming out in magazines over the next few months.

My poem ‘Ashes’, which is taken from the collection I’ve just finished as part of my PhD, will be published in the December issue of Streetcake Magazine. Streetcake is a magazine of experimental writing and a fitting home for this collage poem.

I’ll also have a new poem in the November issue of perhappened mag. perhappened are interested in what they call ‘the frayed edge of memory’ and again, this seems a perfect home for my poem ‘Fox Studies’ which thinks so much about memory, trauma and expression.

I wanted to write a bit about these poems because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the submissions process. I’m doing a lot of private mentoring and teaching now (click here for details if you’re interested) and have a lot of students who are focused in getting their poems into the ‘big’ magazines like Poetry Review and Granta etc. Those magazines are great but no matter how good a poem is, sometimes it just won’t be a good fit. I try to encourage my students to find magazines that publish poems that are similar to theirs in terms of tone, form or theme. I know from my own experiences editing bath magg, we encounter some great poems that just aren’t in line with what we’re trying to do. So if you’re thinking about submitting some poems, really do read the magazines first and try to find somewhere that is dialogue with your own work.

When my new poems are published, I’ll be sure to put links in the ‘Poems’ section of this site.