Subscribing to The Magazine

You can buy The Rialto Poetry Magazine or subscribe here

Poetry Submissions

Submissions to the magazine, publications and competitions.

In The Rialto

“What news on the Rialto?”
Forthcoming issues, events, and submission calls.

IN THE RIALTO

Questions and Answers

Questions and Answers

Q. How do I find out what sort of poems The Rialto publishes? So I can select from my poems ones that they’ll like. A. The answer to that used to be simply buy the magazine and read it. However recent issues (96, 98, 100) have been guest edited (by Degna Stone, Edward...

read more

Close Reading

From time to time, when I’m reading for The Rialto, I come across poems that I really need to write about. Usually my long running wrestle with procrastination gets in the way, but when I wrote the recent Newsletter I found that I was writing about a poem from Issue...

read more
Nature and Place 2023 winners announced

Nature and Place 2023 winners announced

We have now received the results of the 2023 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Ian McMillan and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Kharkiv Zoo’ - Anastasia Taylor-Lind2nd Prize of £500 – ‘Spoons’ – Jo Bratten3rd Prize of...

read more
A reading from The Rialto issue 98

A reading from The Rialto issue 98

The Rialto and Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature invites you to join us online on zoom, with Editor of issue R98, Edward Doegar, for a reading from The Rialto issue number 98. To celebrate the issue we are co-hosting an online reading that showcases the diverse...

read more
Machine poems

Machine poems

‘…when I write about being a cyborg, I challenge reality’ —The Cyborg Jillian Weise, ‘How a Cyborg Challenges Reality’ (The New York Times) ‘Every sexuality has a knowledge and technology and every new way/to move beasts from one crate to another produces a metaphor’...

read more
Crow drop

Crow drop

A radio show I sometimes tune into has a long-running feature where listeners write in about objects that have fallen on them from out of the sky – a slice of white bread, an unopened Mars Bar, jar lids and bottle caps, once (or did I imagine it?) a lady’s watch....

read more

About the rialto

WELCOME

Welcome to the website for The Rialto, where you can find out who we are and what we do, read poems from the magazine, and connect up with our social media pages. You can buy subscriptions, single copies, pamphlets and books. You can learn how to submit your poetry for possible publication, and you can read articles and blogs by the editors, poets and guest writers.

The Rialto magazine is edited by Michael Mackmin working with Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Will Harris and Degna Stone, who are graduates of our Editor Development Programme.

We’d like to say thank you to our loyal subscribers and to the Arts Council of England whose support and encouragement over years have made possible The Rialto. We invite you, reader, to join the team: help make poetry happen by subscribing now.

“The Rialto is the poetry magazine to read – publishing poems that are formally inventive and alive to the ‘here and now’ of the world, but always with a commitment to the humane and compassionate qualities I believe the best poetry has. It has led the way in nurturing new talent.”

Hannah Lowe

THE MAGAZINE

The founding editors, Michael among them, believed in a ‘Republic of Poetry’, an inclusive and diverse world of poetry, one that was open to experiment in form and content. We strive to keep this vision alive.

The magazine appears three times a year and each issue, with its spacious A4 pages, has fifty or so poems, an editorial and occasional, commissioned, prose pieces. Most of the space is occupied by the best new poems we can find, all wrapped up in our famously vibrant beautiful covers.

The Rialto has been called ‘Simply the best’ by Carol Ann Duffy and ‘A terrific magazine’ by Seamus Heaney.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS

At the start of the new millennium The Rialto published a short run of first collections. In 2005 we turned our energy to publishing pamphlets and began our Bridge Pamphlets list. These have so far been by poets who we’ve asked to submit work. We also run a poetry pamphlet competition which has become a fixture of how we discover new work. Oh, and we  haven’t forgotten about first collections – we launched Dean Parkin’s The Swan Machine at last autumn’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and published Matt Howard’s award winning Gall in 2018.

Laura Scott’s pamphlet What I Saw won the Michael Marks Award in 2014, and several of our first collections are winners of major awards.

“The magazine is consistently one of, if not the best spotter of emerging talent in the UK – as a writer you know that you have arrived if one of your poems goes in. It’s more than an imprimatur of quality – it’s a rite of passage.”

Rishi Dastidar

ON SOCIAL MEDIA

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

This message is only visible to admins.
Problem displaying Facebook posts. Backup cache in use.
Click to show error
Error: Error validating access token: The session has been invalidated because the user changed their password or Facebook has changed the session for security reasons. Type: OAuthException

Buy The Rialto poetry magazine

Rialto poetry, blogs and news

POEMS IN THE RIALTO

The purpose of this section of the site is to allow us to showcase or preview poems in our publications.
We hope to invite writers of the poems to respond and give their view of the work.

Crow drop

Crow drop

A radio show I sometimes tune into has a long-running feature where listeners write in about objects that have fallen on them from out of the sky – a slice of white bread, an unopened Mars Bar, jar lids and bottle caps, once (or did I imagine it?) a lady’s watch....

read more
A two poem blog

A two poem blog

Here is one of my favourite poems from the current issue (No. 90), of the magazine. CATFORD CYCLING CLUB RACE THROUGH ASHDOWN FOREST The normal fawn-coloured morning is scored through        with a fast-moving artery of red the jerseys of young bearded men on a...

read more
1 Poultry

1 Poultry

Shoot up in the fast lift, poke the faux gras with toothpick heels. Late lunch at the Coq d’Argent – accept a drink, plan your exit. After two pm the old religion can be smelt – some urban plague myth – even here, halfway to the holding stacks...

read more
Decompression by William Stephenson

Decompression by William Stephenson

Decompression The induction program’s willow pattern eyes and terracotta lips matched those of the woman I married in my first incarnation. She whispered, Just you and me darling me darling – a glitch, surely, A stutter in the software – so make yourself yourself. She...

read more
HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL   BY EMMA SIMON

HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL BY EMMA SIMON

HOW TO BAKE A GINGERBREAD GIRL   by Emma Simon Paint blue icing on her fingertips, fingers that could snap with cold, dipped into fridges and glass chillers placing cockleshell cakes in pretty rows. Tie back her hair, dress her in sexless tabards, dab with jam. Press...

read more
Home by Neetha Kunaratnam

Home by Neetha Kunaratnam

HOME by Neetha Kunaratnam June 23, 2016   I Go Home. We voted leave… Her indignant jaw trembled as she seethed, and the deadpan response I might have mustered froze on my lips, as she brandished a crumpled flyer and unleashed its litany of stats. I’m going I said and...

read more