We invite you to experiment with being radically personal, confessional, honest and evocative of your queer experience. Re·creation aims to explore nurturing, incisive alternatives to the poetic detachment and impersonality more available to positions of privilege and power.  

Re·creation is also a space for empowerment. So, while we invite the personal and confessional, we acknowledge the limitations within those forms, particularly for queer poets. This call is therefore expansive & also invites submissions that challenge visibility and commodification: submissions from resistant, liminal, and nonconformist queer voices. 

We especially welcome submissions from BIPOC poets for this anthology. Please also note that this is an opportunity for poets resident within the UK.   

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All poets selected from this call will be paid £100 for their contribution and subsequently offered free 1-to-1 mentorship, workshops, and roundtable feedback discussion with the editors, other selected poets, and external facilitators.  There will be a handful of places in the workshops for poets who are not selected for publication but wish to have access to development opportunities. 

Please refer to our style guide here before submitting your work to the form provided above:

• Up to 5 individual poems in a single Word document or PDF will count as one submission. 

• Multiple submissions are not permitted. 

• Each poem should have a maximum of 90 lines (including breaks, spaces, etc.).

• Line length should be no more than 65 characters (including spaces, punctuation, etc.) - if a line is longer, it will run-on and be counted as an extra line in the final proof.

• We are open to poetic structures that do not follow the above guidance. If you are submitting experimental and/or visual poetry and are worried about character or line length, please contact us at recreation.anthology@gmail.com to confirm hard margin limits.

• If you write in a language other than English, please submit your work, alongside the equivalent of the work in English translation. If the translation is by a third party, this must be acknowledged.

• Put each of your poem titles in all caps and begin on a new page.

• Use Times New Roman or a comparable serif font.

• We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online.

• Anonymous submissions are welcome. Platforms should not come at the expense of anyone’s personal safety or comfort. 

• There are no submission fees.

We look forward to reading your poems, 

Éadaoín Lynch and Alycia Pirmohamed

Editors of Re·creation