Poets Editing and Proofreading Services

The line break is the only tool poetry has that prose does not, and it is the one most often used by default. A poem broken where the sense pauses is a paragraph with the returns pressed. A poem broken where the breaks do something — hold a word out, make a phrase mean two things for half a second, refuse the reader the resolution they can already see coming — is doing what only poems do.

We work on what poets write — individual poems and sequences, full collections and pamphlets and their ordering, submissions to magazines and competitions, pamphlet and collection manuscripts for presses, translations and versions, prose poems and hybrid work, poems for performance and for the page, acknowledgements and notes pages, and the covering material that goes with a submission. Our editors work at the level of the line.

Line endings are where a poem's craft is most visible and most often left to chance. We work through poems so the break is asked to justify itself in each case, since a break that could be moved two words either way without loss is a break doing nothing; so enjambment is used where the suspended word or phrase earns the suspension, and end-stopping where the closure is wanted rather than merely reached; so the syntactic unit and the line are allowed to pull against each other, because a poem in which every line is a clause has surrendered its rhythm to grammar; so the first and last words of each line are checked, given that these positions carry weight whether or not the poet intended them and a line ending on "the" or "and" should be doing so on purpose; so stanza breaks are treated as bigger versions of the same decision rather than as paragraphing; so the poem is read aloud at the pace of the punctuation rather than the lineation, to hear where the two disagree; and so the shape on the page is checked as a shape, because a reader sees it before they read a word. Poems worked on this way stop looking like prose that has been arranged.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished poems, collections in progress and competition entries. We are editors rather than publishers or competition judges, and we offer no view on a poem's merit or its chances. What we can do is make every break a decision.