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IN THE RIALTO
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’...
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....
Nature and Place 2022 winners announced
We have now received the results of the 2022 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Gillian Clarke and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Blame the Fox’ by Jane Lovell 2nd Prize of £500 – ‘Whales in the Forth’ by Cecilia Rose...
The Rialto Issue 98, Editor Edward Doegar
The next issue will be edited by Edward Doegar. This is the third part of our current grant project which has seen our Assistant Editors taking charge and has so far produced Degna Stone’s The Rialto 96, and Rishi Dastidar’s commissioned pamphlet, The Sea Turned Thick...
The Rialto issue 96, It’s not a war, it’s poetry
The Rialto’s successful Editor Development Programme brought several new editors into the fold under the tutelage of long standing Editor Michael Mackmin, and now three of them are to have free rein over their own issues thanks to further ACE funding. First up, is...
Rialto Newsletter February 2021
THE RIALTO FEBRUARY NEWS ‘I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausages and haddock by writing them down.’ Virginia Woolf HEADLINES THE RIALTO NATURE AND PLACE COMPETITION The closing date for the competition is rushing towards us. Please let us have...
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.”
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.”
ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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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.
TO DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by Ben Wilkinson
[See end of post for image credit] To David Foster Wallace by Ben Wilkinson Since I was old enough to know myself I’ve been trying to figure it out – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing, like half the time I’d chuck it all in; throw...
Dragged Under by Ian Humphreys
DRAGGED UNDER by Ian Humphreys So many wet shaves in a lifetime. How many thousands and thousands? So many .............rituals at dawn’s bleached-bone altar, a falter of sharpened steel on skin. So much water feel it slide .............through your...
A WITNESS by Amy Carrington
A WITNESS by Amy Carrington I've been watching the letterbox, I've been watching her at the letterbox. Her arm is stuck in the rectangle, but not stuck getting out she can't seem to get it any farther in. A gloss-eyed pot fox peers through the doily curtain with me,...
FIGHT SONG by Paula Bohince
FIGHT SONG by Paula Bohince August 2014 A crisis on a monitor, and there’s this football field, white chalk formalizing grass, a spongy black track where I walk off my no-baby weight. A deadline has passed, so a journalist will leave this world violently as I go...
Tristia by Jacqueline Saphra
Tristia by Jacqueline Saphra My friend, we’ve been anchored here for years arguing the toss: semi-colon versus the long dash, our views on Ovid’s Tristia though I haven’t read it, nor have you - and as the room rocks gently underneath us you pour for me a rare tea...
The Booze by Charlie Bird
THE BOOZE by now, the booze is you, you are the booze, mid-rant you stand up too fast, keel over, turn your ankle and I'm supposed to help you up. Oh! the heat and stench of you cursing the world, cursing me, you burst into tears, blurt, 'I'm hurt', that is:...