Intentions

Stone Circle Review intends to…

• Share poems that contain beautifully strange imagery and language that also avoid becoming impenetrable. Poems that find the seam and take root.
• Seek poetry from the most diverse a group of poets possible.
• Publish on a website designed to foreground the poem on the page.
• Make it as easy as possible for poets to submit their work.

Masthead

Founder and EIC

Lee Potts (he/him) is author of two poetry chapbooks: We Will Miss the Stars in the Morning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and And Drought Will Follow (Frosted Fire, 2021). He was poetry editor at Barren Magazine from 2020 to 2023 and co-editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly back in the late 80s and early 90s. He is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife, the last kid still at home, and two cats named Franny and Zooey. He is @LeePottsPoet on Twitter and his website is LeePotts.net.

What you should submit

I’m not sure that it’s possible for me to create a single, succinct, yet useful description of the sort of work you should send. Instead, here are some thoughts about poetry that I believe to be true that might help you get a sense of what SCR hopes to publish:

A poem remains with us to the extent that it allows us to feel that we are listening to a voice at once contemporary and ancient.

— John Haines

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

— Audre Lorde

I find that my poems know far more than I do, and I prefer it that way.

— Bianca Stone

But consciousness and intention do not have the final say in poems: journey far enough, in the terrain of language, it seems, and the heart will begin to speak.

— Jane Hirshfield

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.

— bell hooks

One of poetry’s great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music and image – things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why – is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.

— Tracy K. Smith

I think that literature … is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.

— Javier Marías

Poems are excursions into belief and doubt, often simultaneously.

— Tess Gallagher

Poetry is a lightning rod that transmits epiphanies.

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti