Dear friends, I know all of you are poets, but I wonder if some of you also write short stories and/or essays? Because if you do dabble (or are serious prose-crafters), then I've got something that you'd love (I hope, I think, I feel!). As some of you might know already, ONLY POEMS has a sister mag called Strange Pilgrims, and this year we launched an inaugural prize: the $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for Story of the Year and Essay of the Year! For this award, we've partnered with the...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Dear friends, How are you today? I finally made some time for tennis this week and played some of my best games. There’s a particular joy in getting a little better at something you love. Humans are so cool in motion. As we’re teaching our daughter—who gets mad at herself while learning piano—the only way to get good at anything is through practice. It’s surprising that she already has far better control over her fingers than I do over mine. I hope you, too, are finding time to practice...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Dear friends, I trust this finds you in good spirits. This is the first time I’m sending you an email like this. As suspected, adding music to our website has raised our bandwidth usage to almost 1.2 TB/month! Our 750 GB add-on which we could barely afford was put to shame and increased automatically. Don't worry though, we're not going to remove the music. In fact, we are stupid & romantic and have decided that we want to include audio recordings of each poem we’ve ever published (that's...
21 days ago • 1 min read
Dear friends, A short note today to let you know that we're currently open for our free Poem of the Month contest & we're looking for the best GHAZAL! Some of my favorite ghazals in English are written by the master Agha Shahid Ali, but there are so many more wonderful ghazals out there now since he paved the way. I heartily encourage y'all to send us one ghazal, even if you've never written one before, try it out and submit here before August 7! For now, enjoy our first finalist for the Poet...
25 days ago • 1 min read
Dear friends, It is with great pleasure that we share with you the winners of the 2026 Poet of the Year Award. This year we read through 1,351 submissions — poets writing from everywhere, sending us their most intimate, strange, defiant, and luminous work. I don’t know how or why this is, but each year the pool of poems grows stronger, and with each prize we’re reminded how difficult & delightful this task is. And yet after many hours of endless conversations between Shannan and myself, the...
29 days ago • 2 min read
Dear friends, Each week I write to you, all my anxieties dissipate and I feel I have better & better reasons to be excited. First, we got a few plants for our place & that lifted up my spirits. Me & the plants have been listening to Tchaikovsky all day. Second, our poet this week is the venerable Christian Wiman!!! I’ve been reading & imposing his work on friends for many years. Some of his stuff could compete with the most potent of balms. We have 6 poems alongside an interview. You do not...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Dear friends, This week, we started planning out our visit to Chicago for AWP. After some excitement, we realized I’d need to apply for a visitor’s visa, and then pretty soon found out the wait time to get an appointment is 21 months, so there goes our AWP plans down the drain. We’ll miss spending time with so many of our favorite poets. Hugging wonderful people, getting books signed, giving away books, endless conversations that make the exhausting weekend worthwhile. Alas. Thank you for all...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear friends,I write to you with a lot of excitement today. First and foremost, our featured poet this week is the magnificent Victoria Chang! Victoria was a Poet of the Hour at our booth at the Baltimore AWP and it was an insanely busy hour with people lined up the whole time to get their books signed by her. I myself was star-struck sitting next to her. Interviewing her was a dream! And what magnificent answers too. I can’t wait for you to read Victoria’s poems & our conversation....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear friends, It is my great pleasure to introduce you once again to Anya Johnson, who was our winner for the inaugural Bob Hicok fellowship! Having Anya as our first ever fellow has been delightful. Her poems continue to remain mysterious & interesting. To celebrate her fellowship, she’s our featured poet this week! As part of her tenure, she also edited last week’s feature of Richie Hofmann. In the beginning of this year, we ran this very cool essay by her, and then later this brilliant...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read