For E-Reviews

 

We want your clearly formed and thoughtfully composed opinions. You don’t have to love the book, you don’t have to loath the book—all you have to have is a reaction. We’d like to encourage a personal narrative style within the reviews—don’t hesitate to talk about your own experience with the book, the reasons why you reacted to particular poems, or your motivation for reading it in the first place. For more on this, see our style guide.

Please follow these guidelines:

1.) All E-Reviews must be submitted electronically. Send reviews to:

The subject line should include your name and the word E-Review, ie: “E-Review – John Smith.” Please send the review as a Word .doc or as an .rtf or .txt file, to retain formatting. If those formats aren’t available, simply paste the review into the body of the email. Include your name, contact information, and a brief bio, and also let us know if you’d like your email address included in the review, so readers might contact you.

2.) So others are able to find it, we need the following information about the book being reviewed: the publisher’s name, postal address, and web address (if possible); the author’s name, ISBN#, page count, and cover price. Don’t worry about citing page numbers in quotations—poems are easy enough to find in the table of contents, and to stay uniform, we’re not including them in the reviews.

3.) Reviews can be anywhere from 600 to 10,000 words, on any book of any length relating to poetry—full-length collections, anthologies, chapbooks, essays, style guides, textbooks…anything having to do with poetry is acceptable.

4) Limit the review to one book—we will not publish reviews that feature two or more books.

5.) Please be courteous and professional. If you don’t like the book, criticize the work, not the author. Inflammatory or ad hominem attacks will not be published.

6) No reviews of your own books, or books you helped publish.

7.) No reprints. The rights to the review are yours, so feel free to reprint the review anywhere after we’ve published it, but if it’s already appeared somewhere else, we don’t want it.

That’s it. Send in the review, and we’ll read it quickly and tell you yes or no. E-Reviews posted will stay up indefinitely, unless you request to have them removed. Payment is one copy of a forthcoming issue of Rattle (or any available back-issue upon request).

*Don’t have a book you want to review? Request one.