IN THE RIALTO
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...
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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, but this year we intend opening out the opportunity to have a pamphlet published. Do not submit yet, but do watch the website for an announcement. Oh, and we haven’t forgotten about first collections – we launched Dean Parkin’s The Swan Machine at last autumn’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.
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.”
Competitions
Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition
Anita Pati’s excellent winning pamphlet Dodo Provocateur is nearing readiness. Watch
this space for details of the next competition…
ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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.
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:...
A VISION FOR THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FUTURE OF EAST ANGLIA by Matt Haw
THE BLOG
A POEM BY MICHAEL LONGLEY – NATURE AND PLACE COMPETITION JUDGE, 2018
THE LEVERET For my grandson, Benjamin This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun. The Owennadornaun is so full of rain You arrived in Paddy Morrison’s tractor, A bumpy approach in your father’s arms To the cottage where, all of one year ago, You were conceived, a...
On Let’s Dance
I wanted to write about David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album for the Rialto Cold Fire pamphlet, primarily because it features the song ‘Modern Love’, one of my favourite songs to dance to. Never going to fall for (Modern Love) Walks beside me (Modern Love) Walks on by...
“Din of voices”: on some poems in The Rialto 89
Since issue 89 of The Rialto had its “official” launch at Poetry in Aldeburgh recently – with barnstorming readings from Seraphima Kennedy, Richard Osmond and Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, hosted by editor Michael Mackmin – I thought now might be a good time to shine an...
Autumn 2017
November to November – this has been a difficult year. There have been deaths, illnesses, ruptures of relationships, losses, that have affected me strongly. And I decided to add in, a few months back, the decision to sell my house and move to a smaller one,...
