Our inbox will be open for Issue 13 submissions from June 15 until July 15, 2026.

What we ask:

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

Quick submission checklist:

• 1-5 poems

• 1 document, each poem starting on a new page

• docx (preferable) or PDF (if essential to retain specialty formatting)

• Bio + geo in body of email (we do care who you are, where you’re from, what you did…)

• AI: really? for your wild and precious poems? come on now :(

• Emailed to sweetmammalian at gmail dot com

We seek poems in which we feel a warm-blooded liveliness. Beating hearts, teeth and claws, and/or some rough-tongued tenderness. To get a sense of the range of work we’ve adored before, we heartily recommend 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 love to see 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Email us up to five unpublished poems to sweetmammalian at gmail dot com. Attach all submitted poems in one single Word document or PDF.

Please include an author bio in your covering email (if you’re new to sharing work with journals and writing about yourself, you can find examples from our authors beneath their poems in the site).

Tell us where you’re writing from, whether 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 allowed. Let us know as soon as you can if you need to withdraw work.

We will send a receipt confirmation email once we’ve laid eyes on your submission. If you don’t receive one from us within a week of submitting, it means your email hasn’t reached us. Feel free to follow up if you’re not sure. We only sometimes bite.

The use of generative AI is not, as a rule, permitted*. The editors wish to use our brief time on this Earth to read words summoned from true human hearts, and bear a fundamental distrust of the environmental, cognitive and social destructiveness, not to mention spiritual atrophy, of the plagiarism machines.

Sweet Mammalian loves to hear from new writers and old hands alike - we welcome the emerging, the submerging, the splurging.

Send us your thrilling poetry, 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 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. 

*Sure, if you are working on a poetic text that cleverly subverts the affordances of AI tools, and explicitly discloses the use of these, we may consider it - but it’ll need to be exquisite, thoughtfully-conceived work bringing critical ethics that transcend world-eating predictive-text sloppery. Otherwise we personally encourage full use of one’s own personal mind, language, and soul.