Submissions are CLOSED.

We will reopen for issue 12 later in 2025.

What we ask:

Share your poetry - be it a roar, purr, or pip-squeak. 

Broadly, we seek poems in which we feel a warm-blooded liveliness - beating hearts, teeth and claws or rough-tongued tenderness. To get a sense of the range of work we’ve adored before, browse our previous issues online.

This said, we believe that you should pursue the writing that most energises you, rather than tailoring your voice to journals. We are always pleasantly surprised by new modes of enchantment arriving in our inbox. Send us the work you’d be most chuffed to see in the world.

Email us up to five unpublished poems to sweetmammalian at gmail.com. We prefer to read submissions as attachments in a Word document (or else a Google Doc or PDF). Please include an author bio in your cover note (if you’re new to sharing work you can see the bios of our authors beneath their poems on the website).

We appreciate knowing we’re you’re from, within Aotearoa or abroad. We are centered in Aotearoa New Zealand, but do welcome work from overseas. It’s important for us to be in conversation across oceans as well as within these antipodean islands.

Simultaneous submissions are permitted. Do let us know as soon as you can if you need to withdraw work due to acceptance elsewhere.

As a rule the use of AI is not permitted - we want to see words from real human hearts. If you have work that explicitly and cleverly subverts the affordances of AI tools, and discloses the use of these, we may consider it - but it’ll need to be really exquisite and thoughtfully conceived work.

Sweet Mammalian loves to hear from new writers and old hands - we welcome the emerging, the submerging, the splurging. Send us your thrilling work and spread the word far and wide!

Submission periods for past and future years: if you know us already, you may be aware that we usually open submissions in Aotearoa’s autumn, read through the winter, and reply to all writers and launch the new issue in our Southern hemisphere springtime. These ebbs and flows can change depending on the editors’ schedules, so check back here for updates, or follow us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to hear about our issue launches and next submission calls.