Tuesday 1 August 2017

Submissions closed for Poetry New Zealand 52



Yes, I'm afraid it's official: submissions for Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2018, issue no. 52, due out - I hope - in March next year, are now closed. I'll continue to add various commissioned reviews and other bits and pieces to the text, but any unsolicited work that's sent to me from now on will have to be sent back. You're welcome to start preparing your material for Yearbook 2019 [Issue 53], but it might be better to hold off on that until mid-2018 (we'll be following the usual convention of accepting entries from Mayday until the end of July).

Some of you may have been feeling a bit uneasy about the lack of a reply to the poems you've sent. It's not really practical to acknowledge each submission as it arrives (there've been over 300 for this issue: a new record). I hope that very few of you will be kept waiting any longer than three months from the date of receipt.

So please do rest assured that we're working through them all, and that all of you will receive a reply in the very near future.

So much has been sent, however, that there will inevitably have to be a lot of rejection letters. We all hate writing them, but it must be done. I can already see that there's some fantastic material in my inbox, but there are logistic limits on what even a publisher as supportive as Massey University Press will allow me to include between one set of covers.