Trace Fossils Review positions itself as a refuge for difficult work—poems that are hard to comprehend, hard to write, and hard to submit. The editors, Jessie and Gideon, frame their editorial promise as custodial: they will treat accepted work tenderly, with open ears, acknowledging that the poem will never truly belong to them. This is not a venue for polished, frictionless verse; it is a quarterly print publication seeking the intractable, the resonant, the work that leaves a reader possessed. The review operates four submission periods per year, and this call falls within the Fall window. Poetry submissions may include up to three pieces, each no longer than 132 lines—a total of three pages in the print issue. There is no submission fee. The journal is based online and remote, with a quarterly print edition. The deadline is fixed: October 31, 2026, at 11:59pm EST. What the journal offers is not a prize or a cash award but publication in a quarterly print review that explicitly values difficulty over accessibility. The curatorial vision is one of stewardship rather than mere selection: the editors describe themselves as fostering something resonant inside the walls of the review. For poets whose work is dense, strange, or resistant to paraphrase, this is a rare editorial stance—one that treats the poem as an old house to be entered with care, not a problem to be solved.