Editorial Feedback (Two Options: "Workshop" OR "Merciless")
✅ For all feedback options, we‘ll first review your package and cover letter to see if we can adequately work with your style and provide you with the promised editorial feedback. If we feel we might not be able to serve your style and vision best, we will refund you the full feedback fee.
✅ All poems are automatically considered for publication. If we decide to publish any part of your submission, we will refund you the full feedback fee.
✅ We strive to respond within 9 weeks. Sometimes, it might take a little longer. If it's been more than 12 weeks, we will provide you the feedback and also refund you the full feedback fee.
➡️ PICK YOUR POISON
1️⃣ Workshop
This feedback style is rooted in the MFA space. Focused on being highly constructive, we will excavate what is primarily working in your poems. This is not to say that we will not offer a critical reading to indicate what is not working and what needs further attention. Both are present in harmony. When compared with the "Merciless" option below, however, the Workshop style can be easier to digest and is recommended for newer poets looking for encouragement to chart a positive path forward in their poetic journey. Please send no more than 10 pages of poetry and start each poem on a new page.
2️⃣ Merciless (No getting mad, please)
Hopefully, the name says it all, but here’s more of a breakdown.
The nature of this feedback will not follow the traditional MFA-workshop style. If you have more questions about the differences, then please do reach out to us via email and we’ll be happy to chat.
We do want to make it clear that this Editorial Feedback tier is, as “advertised”, merciless and brutally honest. Please, don‘t get mad at us. We care about poetry. We’ll do our best to help you improve yours.
➡️ PICK YOUR TIER
Please select which tier of editorial feedback you’d like to receive below. Everything we make from offering our editorial services goes right back into running ONLY POEMS.
We prefer 13-point EB Garamond and 1.15 line spacing. Please send no more than 10 pages of poetry and start each poem on a new page. If you are submitting prose poems (which, we repeat, we love) please justify your paragraphs. If you are unable to use our preferred formatting because of technical reasons, that is totally fine.
➡️ THE EDITORS
The people reviewing your work will be either Founding Editor Shannan Mann or Associate Editor Svetlana Litvinchuk, depending on whose sensibility best matches your poetry.
Here are our bios:
Shannan Mann has been awarded or placed for the Palette Love & Eros Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Auburn Witness Prize, Foster Poetry Prize, Peatsmoke Summer Contest and Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize among others. Her poems appear in Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Poet Lore, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review of Canada, EPOCH, december, & elsewhere. She is the Poet Laureate’s pick for Exile. Her essays appear in Tolka Journal & Going Down Swinging and have been awarded the Alta Lind Cook Prize and the Irene Adler Essay Prize. She also translates Sanskrit poetry. Having worked as an editor and educator for nearly a decade, she now raises her baby, studies, writes, and runs this magazine.
Svetlana Litvinchuk is a graduate of University of New Mexico. Her work has received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. She has published one chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) and her debut full-length poetry collection is expected in spring 2026. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ANMLY, swamp pink, Flyway, Rust + Moth, Mud Season Review's The Take, Sky Island Journal, About Place, Apple Valley Review, and elsewhere. Her personal essays have appeared in Plant-Human Quarterly and fiction in Apocalypse Confidential, Astrolabe, and elsewhere. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine she now tends her garden in Missouri.
We look forward to working with you!