A guide
Love poetry and poetry submissions
A short, practical guide to reading love poetry, sitting with poems about loss, and sending your own poetry submissions — with links into the Love’s Reckoning collection by Ella Tan.
The poetry blogRead the love poetry blog中文指南 · Chinese guide
Where to start with love poetry
Love poetry is rarely only about romance. The poems that last tend to hold two things at once — devotion and doubt, warmth and the fear of losing it. If you are new to the collection, begin with the quiet domestic poems, then move to the ones about endings.
Every poem here carries a short note from the author explaining what it came from, so you can read the poem first and the story second — and a spoken reading, if you would rather listen than read.
Poems about loss, grief and memory
Grief poetry does the work of naming what is missing. Short poems often carry it better than long ones: a single image — a closed door, an empty coat, a doll on a windowsill — says more than a paragraph of explanation.
If you are reading through a loss of your own, these poems are grouped so you don’t have to search for them.
How to read a poem closely
Read it aloud once, without stopping. The line breaks are instructions for breath, not decoration — where a line ends is where the poet wants you to hesitate.
Read it a second time and look only for the images. Ask what is physically in the poem: bread, tulips, a stopwatch. Meaning in poetry usually arrives through objects rather than statements.
Read it a third time and notice what the poem refuses to say. The silence in a love poem is often the subject of it.
Poetry submissions: how to send your work
Love’s Reckoning reads poetry submissions from women writers year-round. Send between one and five poems in a single message, with your name and a sentence or two about yourself. There is no reading fee.
Practical advice that applies here and almost everywhere else: keep the formatting plain, preserve your own line breaks, title every poem, and don’t explain the poem in the covering note — let it stand.
Expect a wait. Most poetry magazines answer in weeks or months, and a rejection is almost never about the quality of a single poem; it is about fit with an issue.
Where poetry lives once it is written
A poem can live in more than one place: on a page, in a pamphlet, spoken at an event, or inside a play. The Demolition of Love began as a sequence of poems before it became a verse drama.
If you write, keep a record of where each poem has appeared. Most journals ask for previously unpublished work, and a posted poem counts as published.
Written by Ella Tan for Love’s Reckoning.