Wing Tang Wong

author: Chantelle Bentley asin: 0898799155 binding: Paperback list price: $23.99 USD amazon price: $23.99

Writer's Digest's annual Poet's Market offers great entertainment value. Sure, it lists a whopping 1,100 journals and magazines, 500 book publishers, and 200 chapbook publishers of poetry. Of course it is a great resource for information on contests, awards, conferences, workshops, organizations, publications, and Web sites of interest to poets. This year's edition even features bold new icons, so that you can expediently locate new markets, significant contact- information changes, online publishers, and publishers that actually pay real money for poems. Hey--if you want to see your verse in print, we can even promise that the information in Poet's Market will lead you to publication. (One quarterly ensures that a "subscription guarantees a byline in each issue.") But even with such a remarkable resource on hand, submitting poetry for publication can be a degrading process. The publishers' comments here concerning what they look for in a poem should ease that process somewhat. Over at Bathtub Gin, for instance, they want "no trite rhymes ... Bukowski wannabes (let the man rest) ... confessional (Nobody cares about your family but you)," while Damaged Goods seeks "brave, risky, ballsy stuff ... no kittycat and daffodil poems." Over at Desperate Act, "our ideal writer has a handful of previous acceptances and several hundred rejections, yet continues to toil away at the craft, convinced that just around the corner … are several hundred more rejections." --Jane Steinberg