I’ve had the pleasure of managing layout for Pine Row Press for the past several books they’ve put out. The founding editor there, Hank Hudepohl, has a knack for selecting poets who write with a distinctive voice. Each book we’ve worked on has been inviting—irresistible, in fact—and together they form a cohesive catalog with real breadth. Each book is totally different, but they’re uniform in their excellence.
Pine Row, which is based in Kentucky, is also an online journal, and it seems like a great place for Adirondack writers to send their work, as there is an earthy aesthetic and keen attentiveness to what is published there. Here’s a poem that I recently read and like a lot, “Swagger” by Roy Bentley. It begins:
Doug Barnett had it, swagger, when he unpocketed his
tube of Chapstick in a Kroger check-out line ...
Read the whole poem here, which addresses so many things: union labor, the Vietnam draft, the sexual revolution or fraught relationships (on that last one I’m doing an interpretive act based on the way the poem ends).
The first book I worked on there was Tidal, by Mary Dean Lee, back in March 2024. Her writing credits include Ploughshares, The Fiddlehead, and Hamilton Stone Review. Denton Loving said the poems are “powerfully political and deeply personal.” I found that she writes with vivid language and chooses unexpected details to focus on in her poems. And because she lives in Montreal, I was able to go to the book launch party she hosted there—the rooms were overflowing with friends, good champagne, and art-lovers who couldn’t get enough of her poetry.
I say all of this just to point out that Pine Row, the journal and the book publishing arm, are open for submissions. Here are the guidelines. Note that there is a submission fee, which is standard with online submissions, but note also that Pine Row offers a refreshingly traditional publishing deal, where the writer pays none of the fees and even earns some compensation.
If you’re a poet looking for a place to send your work this National Poetry Month, I think they’re worth a look!