Competitions
Nature and Place Poetry Competition.
Winners announced here.
Subscribing to The Magazine
You can buy the Magazine or subscribe here
Poetry Submissions
Poetry submissions to the magazine.
"What news on the Rialto?"
Blogs, featured poems, news and events, issues, and submission calls.
IN THE RIALTO
Rialto 102: Esther Morgan Thoughts on ‘Midsummer’
MIDSUMMER my boyfriend calls me a clock-watching fuck what can I say, I learn to love my jailers he comes over, we eat: fries, chicken, paratha drink cokes, too tired to mark the day besides living through it. he leaves around ten I go to the window, yes everything is...
Misreading the dream of the rood – sheffield, 1 a.m.
It seemed like a good day to write about this. MISREADING THE DREAM OF THE ROOD – SHEFFIELD, 1 A.M. Bearn: born in a barn, a bairn, a cry in the night, an almost inaudible moan on the wind. Leaking like methane escaping from landfill. There’s always a child...
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...
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....
On scientists and their poetry
Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself using the phrase ‘think like a poet’ a lot, especially as the final idea I want to leave people with, at the end of beginning to write workshops. It sounds sufficiently exhortatory (especially if I’m windmilling my arms while...
THE RIALTO 91 – WHAT’S IN IT?
So what’s in the new issue of The Rialto when it eventually escapes from the Babylon of the Royal Mail and gets itself delivered? Does it live up to the old Poet Laureate’s remark, back in the 1980’s, about being ‘very full and varied’? I think it does. There’s a good...
News
Nature and Place winners 2025 announced
Nature and Place winners 2025 We have now received the results of the 2025 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Helen Mort and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Beryl’ – Rosamund Taylor2nd Prize of £500 – ‘crossing fields’...
Withdrawal from Twitter/X
The Rialto as an organisation has always reviewed its use of social media over our time on all the platforms we inhabit. Over the last two years the advisory board have become increasingly uncomfortable using Twitter/X. We have already pulled back from anything much...
Nature and Place 2024 winners announced
We have now received the results of the 2024 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Zaffar Kunial and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Fox’ - Marianne MacRae2nd Prize of £500 – ‘Extinction Submission’ - AV Bridgwood3rd...
BLOGS
The other Tuesday
The other Tuesday, it was a January Tuesday, I had no clients so decided to treat myself to a proper birding expedition (something I do with increasing irregularity now). I’d got my year list off to a pretty good start early in the month with a walk at Hickling where...
Nature and Place: A Personal Statement
I was told that my first words, lisped in the early 1940s, were ‘flowers’ and ‘airplanes’. So here was Nature. And the place? A new build (finished in 1938) of small, pebble-dashed, semis and detacheds and a couple of terraces a short walk from the terminus of London...
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...
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...
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’...
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...
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 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 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 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.”
