Editorial Assistant Sean Cho A.: For those of you who have stacks of poems and are considering putting together a full-length manuscript to submit to one of the many, many book-publication contests: beyond the holistic craft choices that go into ordering a manuscript, understanding the reading and judging process—how a manuscript is considered for publication—can help your collection stand out from the rest.
As a poet myself, and a manuscript reader for the University of Cincinnati’s very own Acre Books and elsewhere, I’ve had the opportunity to be part of both sides of the process. Being a reader has helped me understand how manuscripts are read in the context of an open reading period or contest and, more vitally, helped me bring concrete considerations to my own manuscript I’m preparing to submit.
The Process
As you likely know, the two most common forms of manuscript submission are open reading periods, such as the one at YesYes Books, or book contests, such as the famed Yale Younger Series of Poets. Though open reading periods and contests have their differences—anonymous vs. name-attached submissions, in-house vs. guest judge, number of books chosen for publication, limited to first books or open to all—these two avenues often share similar processes in selecting manuscripts for publication.
Given the number of submissions a contest or press may receive (Copper Nickel’s Jake Adam York Prize had over 870 submissions last year, while American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize received over 1000 submissions in 2020), contests often rely on a tiered system of screeners, readers, and judges, in which the number of manuscripts passed on to the next level of evaluation is whittled down over time until one winner is selected. This scaffolded approach has its benefits, because getting multiple reads from “screeners” allows for a diverse range of feedback as the manuscript climbs up the ladder of the selection process.
The term “screeners” itself reveals a lot about this first level of judging, since the early stages of evaluation are often “screenings,” a process in which a selection of poems is read, a reader report is written, and the manuscript is or isn’t passed on to the next stage of consideration for a closer reading. Considering that only a small proportion of the work will be read at this first stage, what can you do to make your manuscript shine?
Start strong and finish strong:
You should view the first five to ten poems of your manuscript as an entry point for the reader into the larger conversation of the collection. Introduce the threads, themes, and central concerns of your work. Highlight and showcase a variety of craft choices, and demand the readers’ attention—leave them wanting to read on.
For example, in Yanyi’s collection The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019) the Yale Younger Series winner opens with the formally traditional “Dream Diary,” which introduces us to the concerns of memory, attention to language, and the landscape of dreams. However, we quickly shift to diary-like prose poems and prose-like narratives that acclimate the reader to Yanyi’s range of style and poetic interests.
The final five to ten poems should be viewed in a similar fashion. Arrange these poems so a reader knows exactly where they’ve landed as they finish your collection. Highlight the dynamic landscapes and poetic worlds that the manuscript has built, and consider how the final poems can join in conversation to showcase the overall sentiments of the manuscript.
Take Chen Chen’s collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017). In the last grouping of poems, a reader finds elegies, prose poems, and striking tercets, but also titles that drive home the subjects at the heart of the collection. Titles like “Talking to God About Heaven from the Bed of a Heathen” and “Spell to Find Family” give us insight to the book’s focus on challenging relationships, which all leads to a striking statement in “Poplar Street”:
Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain
& continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names
But be attentive to the larger arc of the manuscript:
During the latter rounds of consideration your manuscript will be closely read in its entirety. Consider drafting multiple, radically different versions. Some questions to ponder as you work on those:
- What is the narrative/emotional/rhetorical arc of the book?
- How are the poetic worlds constructed, expanded, and/or refined?
- Is there a conversation between poems and their presented worlds—or, at what point does the conversation between the poems and their worlds complicate them?
- Is the work asking to end in a resolution or in wonder?
Final Thoughts
I want to reiterate that presses and contests care about our submissions. They’re handled with attention. However, constraints such as time do come into play. By understanding the scaffolded manuscript-reading process, we can present the manuscript in its best form.
As a series of deadlines for submissions approaches, we wish all of you the best of luck with your manuscript-crafting! And keep in mind that our book-publishing arm, Acre Books, will have an open reading period starting in January.
Sean Cho A. is the author of American Home (Autumn House, 2021) winner of the Autumn House Press chapbook contest. His work can be future found or ignored in Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, among others. Sean is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California Irvine and is a PhD Student at the University of Cincinnati. Find him @phlat_soda
