The Nature and Place Poetry Competition 2022 is now closed.
Thank you for all your entries, you can read more about the winners here.
IN THE RIALTO
Pamphlet competition shortlist announced
We are very pleased to announce that the Shortlisted Titles for the 2020 Rialto Pamphlet Competition are, in no particular order, For The Apocalypse Team, Trombone, Hello, Before After, Queerfella, Fridges, Shit Happens, The Sushi Chef’s Wife, The Presence of Absence,...
WORDSWORTH, NATURE, ETC.
Had he lived William Wordsworth would have been 250 years old this April (April 7th.,). Celebrations were planned, particularly in Grasmere, Cumbria, home of the excellent Wordsworth Trust. I’m thinking that actual celebrations will not now take place, so here is a...
The Rialto Newsletter, February 2020
93 The Rialto No.93 is out in the world. Storm Ciara is bustling about making working in the garden unattractive, so here I am sat down to celebrate the new issue. It is actually just a rather wet and windy day here but the weather forecasters seem to have been...
Rialto news – November/December 2019
Dodo Provocateur Anita Pati’s prize winner pamphlet, which we published in the first week in September, had it’s London launch on September 24th at The Poet an aptly chosen pub in Baring Street (N1 3DS). I put the post code in because I must have been one of the last...
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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 regular 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 three of the early first collections were 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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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.
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...
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,...
THE BLOG
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...
Nature and Place 2021 winners announced
We have now received the results of the 2021 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Daljit Nagra and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘They say you sleep 1/3 of your life in the dark with animals’ by Simon Costello2nd...
Rialto 96 – Degna Stone
Hello poetry people! 2020 has been something, hasn’t it? But in amongst all the trauma and the horror, the world has just kept on turning regardless and here I am, putting out a call for your best poems for the spring edition of The Rialto. There has been a hell of a...
THE RIALTO OPEN PAMPHLET COMPETITION 2020 RESULTS
REPORT FROM THE JUDGE, WILL HARRIS I feel uncomfortable with the idea of “judging” because it can suggest some kind of special objectivity and wisdom on the part of the judge. And my only qualification for this role is that I love poems, subjectively and with very...