Scalpel Journal is an online poetry journal publishing thrice yearly beginning in April 2025.
Each issue features ten poets, most of whom will come to us through open submission calls. The remainder of the published work will be sourced through targeted solicitation—in other words, if we love your work, be forewarned: we’re coming for you!
This flexible model of curatorship allows us to more finely shape the journal’s aesthetic and trajectory from within, while also granting us the opportunity (and privilege) to platform voices we know for a fact to be outside the mainstream.
Indeed, our aim is radical and creative inclusivity. To that end, any work containing language or imagery the editors deem racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, or otherwise hateful will be discarded without a response. If you’re in the habit of submitting this kind of work to literary journals, you’re probably used to such dead air.
All that said, we are OPEN for submissions for our first issue through the end of February 2025.
More than anything, we want poems that surprise us.
We are not looking for works of fiction, essays or memoirs—this is a poetry journal. Any submissions containing such work will be discarded without a response.
What we are looking for is poems of all sorts, so long as they are not longer than 200 lines. (If you have your heart set out on submitting something longer, send us a query email first.)
Please send no more than five poems by email. Attach the poems as Microsoft Word documents or PDFs.
And, in the body of your email, please include a brief cover letter listing the titles of the work you’re submitting (and which more or less proves to us that you’re a living, breathing human).
Simultaneous submissions are accepted and encouraged—of course, please do let us know if a piece has been selected for publication elsewhere so we can remove it from consideration.
We aim to respond to all submissions within six weeks. If eight weeks have passed, feel free to query us!
Finally, thank you for trusting us with your words: scalpeljournal at gmail dot com.
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