Acumen 107
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Acumen 108
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An annual subscription to the Acumen Journal covers 3 issues packed with great poetry, scintillating reviews and fabulous features.
It represents great value for money for either yourself or as a thoughtful gift for a poetry-lover.
Editorial
Welcome to Acumen. Do check out our pages and great poems.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT OF ACUMEN. And a special thank you to those of you who have renewed your subscriptions and have added a donation, so that we can keep the price lower. If you haven’t renewed your subscription for Acumen, please do so here.
Thank you to everyone submitting poems and prose. Acumen has been experiencing a wonderful increase in submissions lately, and we’re grateful for the interest in our magazine. Thanks for your patience while everything is carefully reviewed. Please remember we do not accept simultaneous submissions, but we consider postal and electronic submissions. We do, however, encourage contributors to carefully review our submission guidelines to ensure their work aligns with what we publish – poetry and prose on poetry-related topics, and not short stories. To prepare your submission and for more information please see here.
We’re excited to share the latest Acumen with you, though we must apologise for recent postage issues. Unfortunately, some issues of Acumen have disappeared in Royal Mail. If you’ve experienced any delays or problems, please do let us know. Despite this, we’re committed to ensuring that everyone can enjoy the exceptional work featured in the latest edition. PDF copies are available, plus a very small number of printed copies which we are sending to those whose copies have gone astray. Please contact the Acumen editor for more information.
Thank you for your continued interest in Acumen and the world of poetry. As Emily Dickinson said, ‘I dwell in possibility’ – and it is through your support that we continue to explore the endless possibilities of poetry.
I end with lines that have been attributed to Yeats, but more likely originated from English author and playwright, Eden Phillpotts: ‘The universe is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’ I hope that the coming months give you magical things that your senses can sharpen to find, especially through the troubled world that often surrounds us.
Guest Poems and Young Poets
Acumen’s aim is to be wide-ranging, publishing contemporary poets both known and unknown, relying on the strength of the poetry rather than the name behind it.
Selected poems from each issue are posted on the website as guest poems for the week. We add photographs and very short biographies – a thing we don’t do in the magazine, preferring at that stage to let the poems speak for themselves.
Seán Street
Seán Street’s is a writer, poet, broadcaster and was Britain’s first Professor of Radio. He is also a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His most recent collection is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, March 2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, and several studies of sound
poetics, the latest being Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong, published in July 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic. This poem is from Acumen 112.
Caroline Maldonado
Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator living in the UK and Italy. She has translated four collections from Italian (Smokestack Books) and her own poems can be found in ‘What they say in Avenale'(IDP 2014), ‘Faultlines’ (Vole Books 2022) and ‘Mirror and Stone’ (GVart 2024) as well in anthologies and in magazines. This poem is from Acumen 112. The poem includes quotes (shown in italics) from Dante’s ‘Paradiso’.
George Tidmore
George Tidmore is a poet born and raised in Valdosta, Georgia. He presently studies German and Creative Writing at Princeton University. His work has been featured in The #TWP Quarterly Lit Zine.
Natasha Morris
Natasha Morris is a 21 year old graduate of English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. She is a writer of poetry and nonfiction. Instagram @natashamorrispoetry
We love to publish new and established writers, in our journal and/or on our website and we are proud to have discovered many new voices.
We welcome unpublished poems, translations of poems, articles and debate on poetry covering a wide variety of topics and with different writing styles.
Find out how to submit your poems.
Poetry and Prose
Books and publications
We have a range of quality poetry publications for sale which we hope you will enjoy reading including hardbacks, paperbacks, pamphlets and single issues of the journal.
Electrifying Announcement!
Acumen is among the longest-running literary magazines today.
Patricia Oxley started Acumen in 1985 armed with only an electric typewriter, and without subscribers or contributions. Since then it has grown to one of the country’s leading literary journals.
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