Burning House Press are excited to welcome stephanie roberts as the third BHP guest editor of our return series of special editions! As of today stephanie will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the month of AUGUST.
Submissions are open from today 1st August – and will remain open until 25TH AUGUST.
stephanie’s theme for the month is as follows
—BETTER THAN IT LOOKS—
________
stephanie roberts is the prize-winning, Canadian author of the poetry collection UNMET (Biblioasis Books, April 2025). The poet Lisa Russ Spaar, writing for the Adroit Review, said, “One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book [UNMET] feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader. From daring to darling.” Her debut collection rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen’s University Press, May 2020) was an A.M. Klein Poetry Prize finalist. Widely featured in periodicals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe such as Poetry Magazine, Atlanta Review, Event Magazine, New York Quarterly Books, Verse Daily, Crannóg (Ireland), and The Stockholm Review of Literature, she is the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press). www.oceansandfire.com
stephanie roberts lives in Beauharnois Québec. The author of UNMET (Biblioasis Books, April 2025) and rushes from the river disappointment (MQUP, 2020) an A.M. Klein Poetry Prize finalist, she is a 2025 Canada Council for the Arts grant recipient and the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press). www.oceansandfire.com
stephanie
__________
Submission Guidelines
All submissions should be sent as attachments to guesteditorbhp@gmail.com
Please state the theme and form of your submission in the subject of the email. For example: BETTER THAN IT LOOKS/POETRY
Poetry and Fiction
For poetry submissions, submit no more than three of your best poems. Short stories should be limited to 1,500 words or (preferably) less. We encourage flash fiction submissions, no more than three at a time. Send these in as a .doc or .docx file, along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Art
Submit hi-res images of your works (drawings, paintings, illustrations, collages, photography, etc) with descriptions of the work (Title, Year, Medium, etc) in the body of the email. Files should be in .JPEG unless they are GIFs or videos, and should not exceed 2MB in size for each work. File names should correspond with the work titles. Video submissions can be uploaded onto Youtube or Vimeo for feature on our website. Send these submissions along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Virtual Reality/ 3D Artworks
For VR Submissions, please submit no more than three (3) individual artworks. For Tilt Brush works, please upload your artwork to Google Poly (https://poly.google.com/), and mark it as ‘public’ (‘remixable’ is at your own preference). A VR/3D artwork can also be submitted as a video export navigating through the artwork. If you prefer this method, please upload your finished video file to YouTube or Vimeo and provide a URL. With either format, please provide a 150 word artist’s statement.
Non-fiction
Non-fiction submissions (essays, reviews, commentary, interviews, etc) should be no more than 1, 500 words and sent as a .doc or .docx file along with your third-person bio/and optional photograph.
Submissions are open until 25th AUGUST – and will reopen again on 1st SEPTEMBER 2025/for new theme/new editor/s.
BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing stephanie roberts– friends, arsonistas, send our AUGUST 2025 guest editor your magic!
Burning House Press are excited to welcome JOHN TREFRY as the first BHP guest editor of our return series of special editions! As of today JOHN will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the month of JUNE.
Submissions are open from today – and will remain open until 25TH JUNE.
JOHN’S theme for the month is as follows
—INANIMISM—
Submission Guidelines
All submissions should be sent as attachments to guesteditorbhp@gmail.com
Please state the theme and form of your submission in the subject of the email. For example: INANIMISM/POETRY
Poetry and Fiction
For poetry submissions, submit no more than three of your best poems. Short stories should be limited to 1,500 words or (preferably) less. We encourage flash fiction submissions, no more than three at a time. Send these in as a .doc or .docx file, along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Art
Submit hi-res images of your works (drawings, paintings, illustrations, collages, photography, etc) with descriptions of the work (Title, Year, Medium, etc) in the body of the email. Files should be in .JPEG unless they are GIFs or videos, and should not exceed 2MB in size for each work. File names should correspond with the work titles. Video submissions can be uploaded onto Youtube or Vimeo for feature on our website. Send these submissions along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Virtual Reality/ 3D Artworks
For VR Submissions, please submit no more than three (3) individual artworks. For Tilt Brush works, please upload your artwork to Google Poly (https://poly.google.com/), and mark it as ‘public’ (‘remixable’ is at your own preference). A VR/3D artwork can also be submitted as a video export navigating through the artwork. If you prefer this method, please upload your finished video file to YouTube or Vimeo and provide a URL. With either format, please provide a 150 word artist’s statement.
Non-fiction
Non-fiction submissions (essays, reviews, commentary, interviews, etc) should be no more than 1, 500 words and sent as a .doc or .docx file along with your third-person bio/and optional photograph.
Submissions are open until 25th JUNE – and will reopen again on 1st JULY2025/for new theme/new editor/s.
BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing JOHN TREFRY – friends, arsonistas, send our JUNE 2025 guest editor your magic!
Burning House Press will be re-opening for intermittent guest edited editions in 2025 – this will be a completely speculative operation intended to test waters and take temperatures.
Like a lot of the world at that time, BHP were forced to abruptly cease operations during the peak of the pandemic in 2020 – factors including the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional onslaught of that time.
When BHP began in 2016 there had seemed to be a definitive place for a non-ego centred, community approach to literature and publishing – it is to be discovered whether the climate for BHP to exist within still remains.
Therefore – the reigniting of guest editor-led editions is contingent on these external factors and also the physical health of BHP.
We hope that you welcome this news – and will support the effort to return by publicising BHP news and sharing your creative works with upcoming guest edited editions – as we are rebuilding from a starter position at this time.
BHP have deleted all meta social accounts – and operations will be conducted via published content here – and publicised to the community only on Bluesky.
Please follow BHP on Bluesky here to keep in touch with our progress and be part of rebuilding the BHP community.
In the meantime – while your guest editors are assembling and mining the vein of the hour for the themes of each edition – BHP will be celebrating and reposting work from the previous series of guest-edited editions – look out for those posts on Bluesky.
Yours In Service Of Creativity…
Burning House Press
November 29th, 2020
The Dirty Truth About Butterflies
It’s easy for a religiously bred
(misled) girl to make an Eden of
a garden, angels of winged soon dead,
repopulating in three weeks. But love’s
amino acids butterflies won’t find
in agapanthus nectar, waterfalls —
Continue reading “Womannotated – The Dirty Truth About Butterflies”
Scarlet Ibis Variations
SACRED YOU
“…It’s mostly that album A Love Supreme. It feels sacred to me. I had a friend once tell me A Love Supreme is convincing evidence for the existence of God. And that’s really stuck in my head ’cause it’s a little bit true to me.” – John Green, in conversation with Ashley Ford and Kelly Stacy
As if the hands that built this were not so terribly human.
As if the stones are not the slightest bit uneven.
As if there is a waterfall somewhere that could kill this song.
As if the call of a bird is grander than all of the laughter we found.
Look, the stars are shimmering – their masses are exploding with joy. Continue reading “Umang Kalra: Sacred You & Me & My GF Will Change The World”
NOTES:
Three Yoga Poems, from the sequence Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha
‘Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha’ writes through the yoga manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha by Swami Satyananda Saraswati (Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India, fourth edition [2008]) and various news articles published in The Guardian in 2017.
Pranayama
‘the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE’: Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1950).
Mudra
1) ‘I suddenly see that the gesture of a hand could be a poem –
like the mark it might leave impressed in a surface.’
Scott Thurston, Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (2011), London: Veer
2) ‘I offer flowers’ from ‘Offering Flowers’ in Technicians of the Sacred (2017) ed. Jerome Rothenberg, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, p71.
Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha is part of the forthcoming chapbook, Atha, Knives Forks and Spoons Press (2019).
Sally-Shakti Willow researches, writes and performs utopian poetics as ritual to open up [r]evolutionary space for positive transformation. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Westminster. Her poems have been published by Adjacent Pineapple, Eyewear, The Projectionist’s Playground and Zarf. Chapbooks to date: The Unfinished Dream (Sad Press, 2016) and Atha (forthcoming with Knives Forks and Spoons). Sally-Shakti’s other writings and reviews are published in The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, The Contemporary Small Press and Northern Review. Find her on Twitter: @Spaewitch
Eric Blix is the author of the story collection, Physically Alarming Men (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions, The Collagist, Caketrain, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he studies in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Utah. Eric’s work above are fragments from his novel-length prose collage, scrub lands—works in progress.
featured image: Ruby Anderson
Aaron Kent is a poet and the editor of the small press Broken Sleep Books. He is particularly interested in the films of Godzilla, and has recently given up coffee. He lives with his wife and their infant daughter. He really misses coffee. Twitter: @GodzillaKent
featured image: Bob Modem
We Make Our Instruments
Sitar is the prickle of a recent close-to-the-base
of-the-skull haircut tickling uncalloused fingers. Smooth
grapes on spiked vines—the thrumming heart beats
angry blood, in time, when the pressure elevates.
Calcification of heart-wood is how the tune is created.
Seasoning so sweet, incense swirl sounds these
tiny steps that expand slowly like the step of an animated
fairy. She blesses the room with ever-growing pink loops.
Perhaps, we have heard this and confused her hoops
of sound—the small swelling—the augmentation
of pink into magenta into mahogany as the expansion
of our minds.
And sound does work in this way.
Reverberations change the bearer. The weight of sound
waves are manipulated by air, by ear, by the redwood
walls, by the differentiation of instrument. The string.
Slip and stick. Contact the conifer slick. Heart to palm
rounded vehicles in glass cases, waiting to be touched.
The weight of balance on the bow. The density floods
a linearity of grain, or orientation of rings in her trunk.
A bow’s construction. Heat curves. Time wears
finger-grooves into her ample body. 150 taut hairs.
The timing on goat skin, donkey teeth—the weather
across California’s forests and cities. A reliance on
exhumation of rosewood, pernambuco, blackwood.
The skill of the mouth, the precise shape of the teeth
larynx, fine ear-structures—the blessing offered by
the specific elder to the thick elder at the time
She fell—
Once sound starts a journey, does it change the
circumstances?
The inevitable die-out which dampens this quality changes
the heart curves on each wave—pumps blood. Bursts the
ventricles. Drives a thick ginger residue spike through
the temple. Then, alleviates with chamomile resonance.
Titian once made the shadow under my eyes famous
toxic—an exported harvest that reclassified unique
sunlight blooms into beans that oxidize with age. Ages
crumble into the dust we made with our heaving bellies.
Our trees have become instruments—hot bows and gut.
As we boil with them, we suffocate.
No Chicken
She gets the precooked
carcass from the supermarket.
It shares her stature—neck
bobbed and folded. Her grin
is the thick slope of one leg.
She cracks
wing from
slick body—burnt
footless creature; no face—no eyes
to face. Hacked off at the neck. No, face this
meal. She wears
the title—face. No running
from this meat. Grotesque
eloquence in her slashing
lips. Fingers slide. No
running from this, meat.
Nails heavy with the shining
luster of gristle. She gouges out
from tooth. This creature’s salt
fills her cells—changing her to
flesh both gaping and unreliable.
No chicken.
Kari A. Flickinger’s poetry and short stories have been published in or are forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Ghost City Review, Eunoia Review, Riddled with Arrows, Moonchild Magazine, Quiet Storm, and Panoply, among others. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. When she is not writing, she can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat, as well as obsessively over-analyzing the details of neighboring trees.
Twitter: @KariFlickinger
featured image: Ellie Anderson-Hawkins
Yvonne Litschel is a writer from Cambridgeshire, England. Previously she has read as part of the European Poetry Festival. Her debut pamphlet Moth Dust was published January 2018 by Sampson Low. She has a forthcoming pamphlet entitled Immurement set for release in March 2019 with Broken Sleep Books. yvonnelitschel.com @yvlitschel
feature image: Bob Modem
Is it dirt or healing?
Here we are now, standing in generalised anxiety. Our buildings are losing breath at the aorta and feeling phantom pains in the basements and where the urapaa (grave) used to be. Your child has muddy hair and long hair and hair now bedraggled to the ground, calling for a reckoning and sounds, (not to be suppressed). We could have been a compost pile, giving up our bodies to grow healthy weeds as limbs. Instead, they pull the plastics out of whale stomachs while clutching our own.
Continue reading “Sol Marco Duncan: Is it dirt or healing? & Volatile Ground”
Passionflower Your Sleep Routine
I don’t get nearly enough cockroach. My issue is that all I do is smoke rancid butter and, of course, giggle. I tend to scuttle across the floor until my jaws ache. I’m interested in velvet and rotting orchids. Chalk dust – with its powerful antioxidant activity – is like a choir of creamy darkness. I can’t wait to try the endless lines of products, their mix of golden milk and human scalps. I warm a cup of charred wood to avoid feeling hairy, and instead of Youtubeing digestive health into the night, I go thunderous to bed.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 