January 2026: Submissions to sheaves

Submission window will close soon, more news about workshops on land poetry, and some reading recommendations

Happy New Year! And we hope it’s a very healthy one with a mounting list of reads to leave their imprint on the soul. 

With a week left to submit poems, essays, and essay pitches for Issue Seven, we thought we’d send a brief note to remind you to send us your work and that we now offer £75 per poem on publication. How you can put a price on a poem we’re still not sure: consider it a token of thanks rather than a payment, in recognition that while language is mercifully cheap, poetry truly has no price. We only wish it could be more. 

As prose is a new feature of the magazine, we’re especially interested in reading your submissions of essays and essay pitches this round too. Bracing reviews of recent collections are also to our taste.

Guidelines:

1. Please send up to five pages of poetry as a .doc or .docx via email to submissions[at]wetgrainpoetry.co.uk with your name in the title of the document. If your work is visual or contains formatting these formats don’t accommodate, feel free to send a pdf.
2. Essay submissions should not exceed 3000 words. Again, please send us your essay in an editable document.
3. We welcome submissions in translation provided permission has been obtained to publish the original.
4. We no longer accept simultaneous submissions.

More news for you

📌 We’re going to be publishing our first sheaf, designed by Typewronger Books, at the beginning of February, featuring Aea Varfis Van Warmelo, Helena Fornells Nadal, Elle Heedles & Ken Cockburn.

📌 In other news, just a heads up that we’ll be running workshops on land poetry in Glasgow, London and Edinburgh this year. Our Glasgow workshop will be on the evening of the 25th of March and we’ll be posting about tickets for it soon. 

📌 We thought it’d be nice to share what we’ve been reading:

Nasim: 

1. ‘Numb at Burning Man’ by Sam Kriss. This one is a journey. I love the movement between the opening story from the USSR in the 1930s to the tour-de-force and frankly hilarious outsider's description of Burning Man. What kind of bizarre disasters await when we cut off the outside world and flirt with utopia?
2. ‘Notes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime’. Poet Lisa Robertson examines her affair with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebooks and the riveting mental landscapes they open up, describing notes as 'the mapping of nows'. She stumbled upon the volumes by chance in the small French village she lives in, and left me dying for a similar encounter.
3. ‘Notes from a Hedgehog’ by novelist Yan Lianke. He turns the predicament of a writer stuck in a country that censors them into the most radiant of metaphors. By the end of the first sentence, this little piece catapulted me into a sense of aliveness and love for literature — I can't remember the last time I've felt this way quite so strongly. Translated by the fantastic Jeremy Tiang!

Patrick

1. Hamish Henderson, ‘McGonagall and the Folk Scene’: The founder of the folk revival on the bathetic and Scotland’s worst poet
2. Astra Papachristodolou ‘Social Textiles: Poetry as Protest in the Anthropocene’:
   A look at how protest in the UK has shaped the banner’s poetic capacity 
3. Iain Bamford ‘Civil Readings’, PN Review 283, May 2025:
   A lyric essay on continental philosophy with a slant 

We think land gets less poetic attention than it should. Our last post discussed the rationale behind the magazine’s new focus. If you’ve just subscribed, you can read the brief statement here: 

Christie Williamson's reading of 'catch' is now live on our Instagram feed, and you can also read a note on the poem by Heidi Williamson too.

There are still a few copies of Issue Six available for purchase and if you're interested in getting one, simply get in touch with our Communications Manager via email (diana[at]wetgrainpoetry.co.uk) or visit the shop on our website to check out stock on previous Issues.

Thanks for supporting Wet Grain by giving this a read. Remember, if you upgrade to a paid subscription in 2026 we offer a piece of editorial feedback on a poem, free workshop spaces, and sheaves delivered to your door! 

Tierra y libertad,

Patrick & Nasim