Call for Submissions: Queer Issue

January 15, 2012 by admin

For the sixth issue of Poetry Is Dead we welcome submissions from Queer writers, with a strong emphasis on Queer Canadian contributions. As always, Poetry Is Dead is interested in work that runs the gamut of forms—from spoken word to experimental language-focused work.

In 2011, what are the questions asked of Queer writers? What new vocabularies need to be recorded today?

We welcome writing that engages the contemporary, the daily, and the seemingly trivial. Digital networks — spaces of emotional anomie and unintended intimacies — now mediate and organize many Queer experiences. You are invited to experiment with the erotic gaze of the webcam, to reformulate the confessional booth of the Craiglist Missed Connections posting, to explore the poetic lineation inherent in Gmail Chat logs, to otherwise fuck with and foreground the language of online identities.

We invite contributions that question categories of sexuality and gender, that indulge what is otherwise taboo, that speak to the diversity, rather than the homogeneity, of sexual experience.

In recognition of the fact that many of Canada’s foremost practitioners and pioneers of experimental prose have been Queer or lesbian — including Nicole Brossard and Gail Scott — this issue welcomes texts that exist between poetry and fiction.

Guest Editor: Alex Leslie (alexleslie.wordpress.com)

Deadline: June 1,^,2012

To submit, visit the Submission Guidelines page.

go ahead and cry. to break
is to be sanctified. to find in the body
a safehouse where all your monsters
get to be raucous, bring the audience

to their feet calling what. what.
dig at the shame places. your gutter
of a cunt. your crowbar of a cock.
say the words, say fuck and wheelbarrow

and voluptuary until it all sounds
like amen, amen, amen, amen, amen,
amen, amen, amen. why despise

your own wiring? it was desire
that made you

--Marty McConnell, “The World’s Guide To Beginning”