San Pedro River Review

Welcome to San Pedro River Review, an international perfect-bound journal of poetry and art. It is named for the ancient river that flows north from the mountains of Sonora, Mexico, into Arizona.  Launched in January, 2009 as a saddle-stitched journal with a distribution of 75, we have grown and evolved into perfect-bound with our latest distribution nearing 300. 

Representative poets include Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa Michael Weaver, Marge Piercy, Joseph Millar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Pam Uschuk, H Palmer Hall, Wendy Barker, Doug Anderson, Vivian Shipley, Adrian C. Louis, Keith Ekiss, WD Ehrhart, Larry D. Thomas and Alex Lemon.

You may see all our contributors by clicking the Page links located to the left of this webpage. We accept submissions during 30-day submission periods, July 1st and January 1st of each year:

July 1st to July 31st, 2012 -- Non-themed.

January 1st to January 31st, 2013 -- Theme: 'The City.'

We now make nominations for the Pushcart Prize.

We publish approximately 45 to 50 poems and two to four pieces of art per issue. In size, the journal is 5 ½  x 8 ½ . 

What do we like? We prefer work set in tactile imagery, with a vividness of local detail: characters, places, substantive objects. We appreciate Auden's dictum -- 'Report well; begin with objects and events.' We tend to shy away from the overtly political or environmental. We like a degree of pathos, subtle drama, a touch of Lorca's 'duende' that loves "ledges and wounds," and a good use of metaphors and similes. We consider all forms of poetry, including prose poems. To know more, we encourage you to look into the poems of our contributors.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

GENERAL

First, though we have a Postal address, we highly discourage Postal submissions.

Email your submission to: editor [at symbol] sprreview[dot]com . In the Subject line we prefer that put your first and last name, followed by SPRR Submission, e.g 'John Barleycorn SPRR Submission.'

-- We accept simultaneous submissions.
-- Previously published work will be considered on an invitational basis only.
-- Send no more than three poems or three pieces of art. You may submit both. However, if you submit a photo to go with your poem, they will be evaluated as separate submissions; they will not be considered as a single unit.
-- Include a three-to-five line bio, written in the third person, embedded in the body of your email. The bio should be roughly 75 words. We retain the right to edit bios.
-- All work must be that of the poet and/or artist. If you send us a translation of another's work, all legal responsibilities are yours as regards the permission to submit such work and have us publish it.
-- Do not send weblinks as substitutes for the submission.
-- All work must be in English, excluding, of course, the case where a non-English word or term is intrinsic to the poem.

Contributors do not need to wait-out an issue before submitting their work again; we often publish poets and artists in sequential issues.

POETRY submissions should be sent in a single MS Word attachment: .doc/docx or .rtf;  Use standard fonts such as Times New Roman, Garamond, Calibri, Sylfaen, Courier New. If you send poems as .dat files, we will not open them (we can't). If at all possible, left-justify your poems using standard margins; however, not doing so won't keep us from considering your poem. If your poem's title is all-caps, and we accept it, it will not be in all-caps when the issue is published.

-- Poems longer than 30 lines might have a harder time getting accepted. Poems with lines that run margin-to-margin are difficult to publish without forcing us to make line breaks the poet did not intend. Remember, we are 5 ½  x 8 ½ in size. That means if your poem goes margin-to-margin on a standard 8 ½ x 11 size piece of paper, it will likely wrap, or break your line, in a place you don't expect it to.

-- Prose poem submitters should be aware that if their poems are accepted, the poem's margins, as they'll appear in SPRR, may be slightly different than the way they were initially submitted to us.

-- ART submissions may be sent as graphics files (jpeg, jpg; tiff, if you absolutely must). Please limit each file to 1 to 4 megabytes. We seek interesting angles on ordinary as well as downtrodden vistas. We like urban and rural decay, or obsolescence, though we don't limit ourselves to those areas when considering art submissions. Art may be in the forms of sketches, drawings, paintings, or photographs. Please note that if we like your art we will likely ask if we can accept it as black and white.

By submitting to us you grant us permission, if we select your work, to publish it. No separate author's consent form will be mailed out.

Payment, for now, consists of one contributor copy. If you know of an educational institution or library that would like a free copy, please send us their address.

San Pedro River Review acquires first serial rights to accepted pieces, except for work published previously in other publications. Copyright reverts to the author after publication. This does not apply to works we accept that were published previously.

Single issues are available for $7.00. Subscriptions are $14.00 a year for two issues. If you would like a subscription, or to purchase extra copies, you may log-in to your PayPal account (www.paypal.com) and send the payment to: editor[at symbol]sprreview[dot]com. PayPal is our preferred method of payment. However, you may, if you prefer, send a check or money order, made out to San Pedro River Review, to:

SPRR
P.O. Box 7000 - 148
Redondo Beach, CA  90277 - 8710

Venues for purchasing SPRR are expanding. In Tucson, it may be purchased at Antigone Books on 4th Avenue, and at Mostly Books in the Plaza at Speedway and Wilmot. In Ojai, California, SPRR may be purchased from Bart's Books, at 302 W. Matilija; Gatsby's in Long Beach; and Poppies Bookstore, in Torrance.

A few back issues are available, but the Spring 2009 inaugural issue is sold out.

Please note that we also have a Facebook page. This is our general medium for broadcasting updates, such as when contributor and subscription copies are mailed, and so forth.

ISSN 1944-5954 San Pedro River Review is indexed in the University of Wisconsin - Madison Special Collections Little Magazine Unit, and is a member of The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses [CLMP] 

THE EDITORS

Jeffrey Alfier is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a nominee for the UK’s Forward Prize for Poetry. In 2006 he received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize. In 2005 he won first place awards from the Redrock Writer’s Guild of Utah and the Arizona State Poetry Society. He holds an MA in Humanities from California State University at Dominguez Hills. He is an Air Force veteran with 27-plus years of officer and enlisted service, and a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). He has also worked as a functional analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, and once taught history as an adjunct faculty member with City College of Chicago’s European Division. His publication credits include Bacopa, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blue Earth Review, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, The Cape Rock, Chiron Review, Concho River Review, Connecticut Review, Crannog (UK), Cutthroat, Dislocate, Emerson Review, Georgetown Review, Gihon River Review, Hobo Camp Review, Illya's Honey, Inkspill (UK), Iodine Poetry Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Limestone, Lindenwood Review, New Madrid, New York Quarterly, North Chicago Review, Pacific Review, Owen Wister Review, Permafrost, Poetry South (UK), Post Road, RE:AL, Red Cedar Review, Red River Review, Rhino, The Saint Ann’s Review, Santa Clara Review, Southwestern American Literature, Sport Literate, Sugar House Review, Texas Review, Three Coyotes, War Literature and the Arts, Vallum (Canada), Whiskey Island Review, and Xavier Review.  His chapbooks are Strangers Within the Gate (2005), Offloading the Wounded (2008), Before the Troubadour Exits (2010), Bluesman's Daughter (2011), The Torch Singer (2011), and The Gathering Light at San Cataldo (2012). His first full-length book of poems, The Wolf Yearling, will be published in 2012 by Pecan Grove Press.

Tobi Cogswell is a two-time Pushcart nominee.  Publication credits include Spoon River Poetry, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Illya’s Honey, RE:AL, Red River Review, Turbulence (UK), Sandy River Review, Slipstream, Penumbra, Spilt Milk (UK), Inkspill (UK), Iodine Poetry Journal, Frostwriting (Sweden), Los Angeles Review, Kaleidoscope, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon Journal, Slippery Rock Arts Bulletin (SLAB), Chiron Review, Front Porch Review, and Untitled Country Review, among others, with work forthcoming in Bacopa, Compass Rose, Three Coyotes, StepAway Magazine (UK),  Palehouse -- Letters to Los Angeles, and Alligator Stew (UK). She has three chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection “Poste Restante” is available from Bellowing Ark Press. 

Silence is a part of language and an authentic poet is distinguished more by the temper of his silences than by the sonority of words.

              Ocatvio Paz, commenting on Jorge Guillén, The Siren and the Seashell