WELCOME! General Submissions for the summer/fall 2023 issue are open from Jan. 2 – March 15, 2023.

We accept ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS ONLY through our online submission manager. Emailed submissions and mailed submissions will not be considered. Please submit no more than THREE (3) unpublished NARRATIVE poems of no more than 50 lines per poem. Put all the poems into ONE attached file (.docx or .pdf only) through our Submittable. Please remove your name from the file with your poems.

Questions ONLY: Feel free to email us at naugatuckriver@aol.com. .

All poems will be considered for publication. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know immediately if your poem is accepted elsewhere. We claim first North American publication rights, so rights revert to the author after the initial publication period, just please give us credit. We will only consider work that has not been previously published.

WHAT IS NARRATIVE POETRY?
We get this question quite often. What NRR is looking for are poems that tell a story, or have a strong sense of story. They can be stories of a moment or an experience, and can be personal or historical. A good narrative poem that would work for our journal has a compressed narrative, and we prefer poems that take up two pages or less of the journal (50 lines max). We are looking above all for poems that are well-crafted, have an excellent lyric quality and contain a strong emotional core. Any style of poem is considered, including prose poems. Poems with very long lines don’t fit well in the format. Hope this helps.