Redivider: Poetry Submissions

Overview
Redivider operates from within the graduate writing program at Emerson College, a context that shapes its editorial temperament: the journal is run by emerging writers who are themselves engaged in the daily labor of making and revising. That proximity to the workshop does not make the review less rigorous; it makes it more attentive to the technical decisions—line breaks, indentation, the architecture of the page—that distinguish a poem from a paragraph. The journal publishes work that rewards that attention. The submission parameters are deliberately narrow. Up to five poems, no more than ten pages, submitted as a single document. There is no reading fee. The journal does not accept work from current Emerson College students, faculty, or staff, and former students must wait three years after graduation before submitting. These restrictions are not incidental; they preserve a measure of critical distance between the institution and the work it selects. What the journal offers is publication in a venue that takes typesetting seriously. The editors note that they can publish poems featuring complex enjambment and indentation, but they ask that longer poems be submitted with a realistic sense of the labor required to set each line as the poet intended on a web page. That caveat is a curatorial statement in itself: Redivider is interested in poems whose visual and spatial dimensions are integral to their meaning, and it is willing to do the work to present them faithfully. Poets should read it as an invitation to submit work that depends on the page, not merely work that survives it.